As described in my text for ‘Tower of Silence’ the success
of a piece, if it is to be truly successful rests upon not merely the actual,
executed painting but equally importantly on the conceptual framework
underpinning it. If form and content exist in dynamic equilibrium within the
work then there is a concomitant redoubling of the power of the piece to
communicate, to satisfy our longing for images that feel meaningful. In this
way a painting can become the embodiment, in Joycean terms, of ‘the universal
in the particular’.

My aim in making ‘GLF’ was to treat my favourite bird, the
humble Sparrow with the reverence I hold it in, to venerate it, and by doing so
to place the Sparrow alongside the epitome of all depictions of birds in art
history: Carel Fabritius’ ‘The Goldfinch’.

Why was it important for me to attempt this?

Many years ago, I found myself recuperating from a collapsed
lung in Nabuel, Tunisia. A few days before, very early in the morning and about
an hour into a three-day journey into the Sahara Desert near Douz in the far
south I had suddenly been in great pain when I saw a man approaching from the
desert riding a camel. He gestured urgently for me to return from the way I
came, I took heed.

Each morning, I woke in Clinique Les Violettes to the sound
of a group of boisterous Sparrows. I could not see them - the high windows were
shaded by blinds to keep out the heat of the day - but their chattering quickly
became the sound of hope, of home and of life. And I was grateful for their
company as I recovered. Their evident liberty was in stark comparison to my
intubated state and much like Fabritius bird it might be some time before I was
allowed to fly.

Now, as we are all surely aware, the decimation in the
numbers of birds during our lifetime is the result of our desultory treatment
out our shared habitat - in particular in the long misuse of pesticides to
maximise the productivity and yield of cash crops through the eradication of
any and all competition for the nutrients and conditions which allow these to
grow. As I write this in a studio surrounded by uncut grasses and wildflowers I
cannot and have yet to hear a single grasshopper or cricket, I hear no Swifts
and the number of Swallows and House Martins is far less even than last year.
It is as if the sound of summer has been muted and all the while the sun blazes
ever more fiercely. There are no Sparrows outside my window, not one, and I
miss my formerly ubiquitous and constant companions. There is an intangible
sense of exile, of something essential lacking, a disconnect. As a wise man
once said you can never truly return home, the past is indeed another country,
and the future appears ever bleaker.

And yet we are condemned to continue. What solace can art
possibly offer, what hope can it instil and what agency in the ‘real’ world can
it instigate? I still believe art can do
all these things. Art can and must at
least try to emulate the apparently simple power of Fabritius moral, ethical
and environmental message encoded in his tiny painting of a chained Goldfinch.
We as artists should try to break Blake’s ‘Mind Forge’d Manacles’ that bind us in what I
call wilful ignorance, to attempt to
reflect the existential issues facing us and to shake us from our complacency.

But can a painted image really change anything? Robert Hughes once said that that possibility
ended with Picasso’s ‘Guernica’. In the late 20th and early 21st
century the single, static image has been reduced to an ephemeral unit of disposable
‘content’ in the ‘attention economy’. If
an image surpasses the momentary it is rendered by this process a ‘meme’, the
significance of which is, through this process, emptied of all meaning.

How can a mere painting compete in this arena, should it try
to, can art bear this weight?

I believe ‘great painting’ through encoded cultural
significance still has the power to change something but it requires of
us artists to be even more fully engaged with, and have still closer empathy
for our habitat; to seek kinship.

This is the value of art,
of painting, and the challenge is to communicate this and to persuade through
art a change of attitude.

In all forms of art there is always a precedent encoded in
our culture. If we engage in any creative act this inheritance is expressed in
unconscious ways. Both mind and body carry this legacy too. It seems evident to
me that intrinsically we are mimics; we draw before we write, we see something
and attempt replicate it, to draw it (and to draw it forth). Consider how we
learn to read after all - we are taught to match the image of a thing to a
sound and then to connect that sounds’ expression to a letter or word; a shape:
Moo. ‘Logos’, rather than meaning The Word, is perhaps more accurately
Image/Word; letters and words being simplified and refined pictures.

What I am attempting to do as artist is to arrive an ‘Image’
- something that the viewer recognises both consciously and unconsciously – a
sign. My work is rooted in a personal
relation to the world past and present (it is said of artists that there
are two kinds: those that try to express the contemporary moment and those that
engage with the entirety of the history of art. I try to do both) My work is
thus Mythos in precisely an Aristotelian relation to this dialectic; my work a representation
of my active part in it, drawing together and utilising the three
principles of rhetoric, of persuasion: Pathos, Ethos and Logos to form each
image as an embodied emblem that seeks only to connect.

The Four Pests Campaign was one of the central pillars of
Mao’s Great Leap Forward. It sought to eradicate rats, flies, mosquitos and sparrows.
Between 1955 and 1960 billions of sparrows were killed mostly by rewarding
children to do so. The Great Chinese Famine of 1959 -61- the result of this misguided
campaign, killed tens of millions.

Between the year of my birth 1970 and today the decline in
the number of Sparrows and all other birds globally is inestimable. In the UK
alone it is estimated that Sparrow populations have declined by 93% since 1970.