To
know where you have been, is to know where you are going.

This
painting like many of mine sets a stage within which the happenstance, the
fleeting glimpse can occur.

In
this instance the valley, mountains and outcrops are that stage. The three
deliberately Goya-esque trees are in fact located in that valley but in
‘Barranco’ are transposed, similarly, the three Ibex are from photo’s I took of
them over the years. Altogether I must have hiked more than thirty km and some
thousands of meters in altitude on several evening, at the same time of day to
gather all the reference for this piece.

After
about two months painting it was time to let it and thus the place go both
literally and figuratively since this is a highly reflective piece
encapsulating almost twenty years of familiarization with every rock and nuance
of my former home valley; the Barranco de la Abuela.

It
was important to me to take on such a big landscape to record a highly emotive
and retrospective depiction of a place forever lodged in my psyche and it was
also to take on the ‘grand view’ in the tradition of the Hudson River School of
painters, to take the humble, quotidian view I saw and render it mythic much in
the tradition of the great Russian landscape painters like Isaac Levitan and
Ivan Shishkin. It was also to address directly Goya and the Spanish Landscape
specifically The Disasters of War, Los Capricios , and indeed the Black
Paintings. In short ‘Barranco’ is a painting of the notion of ‘home’ from a
position of exile and an attempt to find the universal in the particular.