The tension that reside in landscape painting is largely technical, and it is one reason why the subject is frequently avoided by painters in the middle stages of their career. The main problem is the contradiction of the flat surface of the canvas and the innate space of the landscape. Since the latter half of the twentieth century it is the Greenbergian sense of the flatness of the canvas which has become dominant and so instinctively the landscape is avoided by those painters wishing to use a motif in their attempts to avoid becoming an abstract painter. (cf Jim Dine's remarks accompanying his 'Heart' prints) However, this problem of the surface is one that can possibly be resolved through colour and light envisioning space as ripple rather than sequencing.

I have been looking at ways in which abandoned buildings achieve a wholly new identity in the landscape, how they become something else: a identity created by their new function as emphasis in the landscape. The redundant pillbox has become a monument; the abandoned house from the 'Clearances' in Scotland gradually sinks into the ground like a dead sheep, who of course replaced the inhabitants. These buildings now have the function of halting the eye and positing the landscape as memory.