When the bus finally made it’s way into the south of the Czech landscape the snow was about 8- 10 feet in drifts which reached up and over some very low houses and blocked roads so that only walking was possible, so I did quite a bit of walking! fields thick with snow and ice awaited me..the soil was frozen solid.
I could have done with a stove later on! but I did eventually have a nice dry place to stay..
there was a bundle of sticks perched on this horizon which gave a surreal feeling to the land, I passed the odd person huddled in their coats against the cold..
the roads in Wales were like this when I left for my journey..
the technique with the black line is supposed to represent some sort of film strip..
The sketchbook for the project was a series of analogue photographs taken during the winter of 2005-6
I was exploring the Cambrian mountain region of Wales and the inner region of the Czech Republic called Moravia.
At the time I was trying to connect the two cultures through landscape.
I had been across Eastern Europe at an earlier stage when I visited the then Yugoslavia and after that Romania and Hungary, the rural landscapes were immensely evocative to me with the history of the movement of people being a direct influence on the memory aspect of the work.
I saw most of the landscapes from a train or bus window or while on foot. I decided to use my memory rather more than I would have normally to produce the final pieces and although I eventually had a folder of photraphs to refer to I found that my memory became more sharp once I began producing the work on canvas..
The largest paintings were approx 300 cm x 200 cm, they needed quite a lot of space which the mid Wales arts centres provided for final exhibition.
