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"Fictive Things" is the title given to a new flow of narrative work that began in 2005. The phrase comes from a poem by Wallace Stevens.

The earliest picture was the so-called "Jazz Curtain", followed by images of Noah and St Francis, among others; the most recent have been sets of "Stations of the Cross"...

far left, "Cross-Rhythms: The Jazz Curtain"; left middle, "St Francis at San Marco";

The phrase is chosen from a poem by Wallace Stevens, "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman", that I have loved for thirty years. Like many others, I was first introduced to Stevens' work through the etchings done by David Hockney on "The Blue Guitar".

My story begins with a commission for a jazz backdrop in the South of France. The commission specified jazz musicians playing in the open air, under a tree or trees, in a Mediterranean setting.

The painting, approximately 6'x9', painted as a hanging scroll and entitled Jazz Curtain: Cross Rhythms, was unveiled at Easter weekend, 2005, in Anita's Jazz Attic in Lorgues in the south of France. To date all Fictive Thing paintings have been hanging scrolls, that's to say on unstretched canvas.

This is the poem from which my inspiration sprang. It is published by Faber/Knopff and appears either in the Selected Poems or, of course, the Complete.

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
by Wallce Stevens [1922]

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

This poem, with its unfettered imagery, belief in the fascination of life and dizzy perspective on the idea of truth, gave me a vein of courage I greatly needed and prompted my ideas of landscape and journey to go further, and seek a narrative and even religious dimensions.

it was followed by the appearance of Noah and Dionysus at the Domaine Grand Cros, in a show entitled "Grapes", in 2006,

and by the "Stations of the Cross as from the Eyes of Jesus" at St Andrew's Fulham Fields, London, in 2007.