Sandspoor XIII

'In the artist's view his paintings of the early 1960s differed from those of the late 1950s. The forms were generally larger and there was less emphasis on visual flux. He acknowledged their relationship with landscape: 'I used to be a landscape painter. Am I still influenced by landscape? The landscape I live among is bare of houses, trees, people; is dominated by winds, by swift changes of weather by the moods of the sea; sometimes it is devastated and blackened by fire. These elemental forces enter the paintings and lend their qualities without becoming motifs'. This echoing of natural processes was evident in the Sandspoor series, which was based on the idea that sand bears witness to the natural processes which have shaped it. That structures in the desert or sand dunes on the beach have been carved by the wind or by water is consistent with the understanding of landscape as a record of its own history and reminiscent of Thompson's theory of growth and form ... The artist explained that Sandspoor was a 'generic title of a series partly descriptive (traces left by water, wind, etc. on sand), but mainly concerned with the spoor as a record of an action' ... The concept of the landscape as a bearer of memory, a record of its own past, is registered in the paintings' structure of superimposed layers which mimic the results of natural processes and the decomposition of past occupations' (see C. Stephens, Bryan Wynter, London, 1999, pp. 56,9).