The Gloucester Series

The five landscape series of 2002 have been made in quantities of eighty to one hundred panels, each set generally taking three weeks to complete. The subjects were drawn from personal journeys in the past five years. The panels are worked on flat, painting twenty at a time in fifteen minute bursts. They are laid out on an old framed 6' x 3' piece which is also serves as a container for the pool of colour washed over the textured surface. Two inch square wooden cubes are used to stack the panels in small towers to dry out. Various factors steer the series' development: there is an initial colour plan; I think about the loadbearing pressures on a place, tracks and crossing points, airflow, water, spaces and intervals, the nature of settlement in the land. For a city: light and shadows on buildings, streets, side alleys and hidden courtyards, people, stores, traffic, noise, incidents and interruptions. I may use rough handling of the medium to make it work, paint responds to that. The panels form a continuing conversation with the colour plan, titles are assigned later to photographs of the line of production. The identity of a place is achieved not by literal description but as an equivalent found by coincidence in the passage of an abstract process. Philip James, Cv/Visual Arts Research, July '02