There and Back Again was a two-man exhibition that artist Kerry Harding and I presented in the large lovely space that is the Penwith Gallery, St. Ives.  We have had a rapport and an understanding of each other’s work for a long time. After both having successful careers showing mainly abstract work, we found that we had separately been on a journey that introduced more figurative elements into the painting, while still very much retaining the abstract sensibility as the key factor; hence, the idea to show together. For this exhibition, Kerry’s work took her local landscape as a starting point, whereas my inspiration came more from my travels. 

I brought together the new series at the time, ‘Road Trip’, with ‘Dark Waters’, and several other series that had been painted in response to places I had visited in the preceding years. The emphasis on process, the act of making, was the common factor that held the show together.

‘Road Trip’ was an imagined American road trip strongly influenced by the film ‘Paris, Texas’, whose director in turn had been influenced by Edward Hopper. 

‘Dark Waters’ was a series of work that responded to photographs taken of Hong Kong harbour. The scene is superficially beautiful, but the lifeless dark waters and bronze-tinted atmosphere in the polluted skies shows how the massive commercial enterprise threatens nature. The toxic assault was the overriding theme to my interpretation.

I also created an installation of my A3 photopaintings of New Zealand, my first experiments with photopaintings (the name of this technique I borrowed from one of my greatest influences, Gerhard Richter). I had previously shown three of these triptychs at Falmouth Art Gallery in an area set aside for experimental work called ‘Limelight’. Now I put them all together as an installation. In this setting I mixed the images fairly randomly, some still in their triptych form and some separated. The viewers, especially children, seemed to enjoy spotting the three that had gone together. Young artists and students responded well to these images.