The idea for a picture of Bryce Canyon in Utah was a commission from a friend and long-time collector of my work.  It seemed odd at the time, but has had an immense influence upon my work.

Bryce is the start of the gash in the Earth's surface that leads eventually to the Grand Canyon; unlike the Grand Canyon, the magnificence of Bryce is in its vast intimacy.  You can take trails down into it and see how heat, wind and water are shaping it every second of your stay. 

It was for me also the first time that I had felt as if I were in a religious, indeed Biblical landscape, a place where one comes to achieve a concentration unavailable elsewhere.  Two things contribute to this impression: firstly, the noise of the silence, the presence of space as sound, and secondly, the evident and inescapable fact that everything one looked at was still in formation, through the drift of sand and the erosion of shapes.

For once, in addition to sketching, I took photographs on a camera with minute resolution and a terrible lens; some were made into a composition (you can see it at the foot of this page) but one, where I used a tree to shield the lens from the light, fixed itself on my mind as the right metaphor for the place and became the basis of the composition of the painting.  The central tree is a device also of the images of St Francis and the Jazz Curtain.

In the sketches you may be surprised at the wispiness of the line; it surprised me too, as in the face of such tough nature I had at first expected to do 'tough' draughtsmanship; but they are lines telling of where air and silence brush with this ephemeral planet, that's all.

The painting is on a hanging canvas and while the central tree is there, the falling and rising perspectives & horizons to either side are not at all photographic.  There is no figure, yet in the aura I hope pervades the picture the viewer, the wanderer becomes the subject and that instinct, intangible enough at first, in 2005, when the picture was done, germinated in the later idea for the Stations of the Cross, done specifically with no Jesus in view; done as if from His eyes.