1994 Beardsmore Gallery

"OASIS" .... TO .... "ORPHEUS"

It is as though there is an internal landscape: an inner territory of sensation. Memories of heat, dust, visual recollections of places, of light and colour mix equally with more incorporeal abstract ideas, intuitions about imagery, emotional atmospheres and thoughts about paint, scale and picture structure. The topography is flexible. A piece of work grows like a journey of shifting connections and "places" emerge where several elements combine into a single vista. The works from which this exhibition is selected could be considered as "places" discovered.

From September 1991 to August 1992 I painted the ten canvasses of the "Oasis" series. In general these paintings are places of tension between expansion, life and abundance and ruin, pressure and decay - the balance often shifting from one canvas to the next. The work on No. IX was suspended briefly for a journey through France to the south and back again. The internal territory became expanded with new light and colour, memories of hot dusty weather, the luxuriance and the spikiness of the physical geography. The end of "Oasis" slides easily into the paintings linked to the idea of the "South". While in France a short but influential stay with a friend at her house provided the initial elements for the "Two Pools" paintings: the contrast of the raised swimming pool and, at a deeper overgrown level, the darker shaded water. Gradually this real place assimilated into the internal landscape. A half camouflaged creature imagery developed in the undergrowth. The move from here to the beginnings of the "Orpheus" paintings has emerged, but a hotter, more burnt, spiky and pagan place, and now showing the trail of some human violence.

David Royle, 1994