Texture Progression

Texture in landscape, rock formations, sky and water have held an enduring fascination.

This series of works has been a more recent development and a return to simplification similar to what happened to me when I first developed an abstract language. Leonardo da Vinci described in his notes that light and shade should blend “without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke” and in this manner I have tried to make a seamless transition from the finest blur of implied distance in a gradual and consistent progression to the most highly and strongly defined foreground structures and marks. This apparently simple task is something which seems brand new each time that I start to attempt it and it puts me right on the boundary of my ability. It cannot be captured in photography with even the most sophisticated lens and presents problems that require many and varied solutions but in combination sometimes with Runic Series I have made attempts. One by-product is that it has encouraged me to work more in monochrome, an activity that helps me to occasionally “clear the desk” so to speak.