12 November, 2002, Christ Church Picture Gallery
I’ve returned to study the fragments of what was once an intact and magnificent altarpiece. There is a collage reconstruction in the Christ Church catalogue of how the whole may have appeared before the act of vandalism which reduced it to a jigsaw puzzle. Nineteen pieces are spread across the world. Christ Church has nine, the largest number in one place. These dismembered relics by an artist or artists unknown are so beautifully painted, and yet so heart-achingly incomplete, that the images contained within them have haunted me since I first saw them last Easter.
    The scenes are bathed in an unearthly, greenish twilight which fools you into thinking that you are about to strain your eyes. Yet the paradox is that, when you draw close to the paintings, there is in them a dreadful clarity, as in the worst nightmares. The desert floor ripples like wave-washed sand, while the rocky places are modelled into stiff meringue peaks of ghostly greys and umbers. The figures, animals and trees throw no shadows, and their lack eerily heightens the dream-like state. Patches of richness irradiate briefly: the tawny pelts of wild beasts, the iron oxide of pantiles, the crimson flash of an angel’s unfurling wing.
    Islands of vegetation are darkly impenetrable, traceried branches and leaves patterning the shadowy depths like sombre brocade. In two of the scenes the sky is visible, a thunderous Prussian Blue, lightening only towards the horizon. In just one painting does relief come, in the form of a distant, cheery prospect of golden hills.
    The ground particularly is unnerving, scattered with bone-like pebbles, snakes and odd, pincer-shaped plants that might be traps for the unwary. Bare feet seem vulnerable in such a hostile terrain! And I don’t like the look of the water either. Clouded, phlegm-green, and perilous with currents, undertows and whirlpools. In a sharp-snouted black boat, two winged demons are doing something unspeakable to a naked man, possibly with grappling irons.
    The picture planes are flattened. Landscape rears up and details appear undiminished by distance. In seven out of the nine paintings, vermillion flares in the dusk - most spectacularly in the tunic of a barbarian being devoured by a lioness. It’s as though the splendour of his garment has marked him out for a blood-letting!
    Evil things walk in the light. A fearsome devil steps shockingly from behind a rock to brandish a scythe in the face of Abba Macarius, and an Ethiopian reels beneath the blows from a sturdy demoness. But to balance these horrors there are passages of tenderness and strange beauty, such as the sainted monk rising like a flower bud from the hollow heart of a tree, fed from on high by an angel descending from the clouds with a gift of bread.

December 2002, Prague
At my studio back in Cardiff the walls swarm with a cast of hermits, angels, penitents, devils, wild beasts and anchorites. They are made of roughly painted card, jointed for articulation and capable of surprisingly varied and unlikely positions, rather like elaborate shadow puppets. They were constructed as studio aids to achieve a more expressive use of the human figure and free me from the choreographer’s understanding of the body.
    I’m reminded of these matters as I discover the treasures of the Narodni Gallery here in Prague. So many of the figures in these Gothic Bohemian paintings have the same kind of postural distortion that I’ve been striving for in The Temptations of Solitude. In the Master of Wittingau’s The Agony in the Garden, Christ on his knees forms a perfect and sinuous ‘S’, and his agonised shape emerging from the shadowy, foliate background of Gethsemane infuses both the figure and the painting with a desolate isolation. Here form and colour conjoin to conjure the emotional tone of the subject. This is not about flesh and the corporeal body. The image almost ignites with the violence of Christ’s spiritual agony.
    Crossing the deserted Charles Bridge at midnight, a dusting of snow muffling our footsteps, we passed an elderly man sitting at a little table, only his long beard and mittened fingers showing outside his old great-coat. He was playing a dulcimer, his Jewish folk tunes fading in the gusts of wind that scattered them to the darkness, as timeless and melancholy as the frost.

1 May 2003, Venice: The Accademia
Saint George stands with head cast down, in three-quarter profile, his weight elegantly borne on his right hip. He holds his spear as lightly as if it were a violin bow, but the point has violently pierced clear through the skull of the dragon on which he poses. He has red gold hair and the blushing complexion which so often accompanies it. His armour is dark, banded with gold, wasp-waisted and elegant. But the things which intrigue me most here are barely visible: his wings - crimson and slender, and folded behind his back.
    Wings have been preoccupying me for some time now. Caravaggio grafted the wings of pigeons onto the backs of youths, and magnificent though his vision is, this borrowed device has not worked for me. It has made my first drawings of angels look like actors wearing something from a costume department. (But then I’m no Caravaggio.) There are wings aplenty here in the Accademia, and in every shape and hue.
   The Bellini Annunciation - The angel seems frozen in the moment of entering the room. The door behind looks as though it could barely have contained him. There is an awkwardness in the painting of the raised hand of benediction, but I like the feet enormously, harnessed unforgettably in a fetishist’s skin-tight, coral leather. His robes are arranged in oddly stiff folds, as though the artist has composed a still-life in the studio from an empty garment and then painted the result onto the figure. The lily the angel carries cuts a silhouette through the bright light reflected from a window-shutter. I love the formality of the room: the tiled floor with the asymmetric vanishing point, and the dream-like landscape beyond. But the beauty of the painting for me lies in Gabriel’s turbulent, headlong rush into the soundless vacuum of the room where Mary waits in stillness. It’s the captured moment before his wings unfurl, after which the air will be filled with feathers, cool, billowing satin and flying golden hair. And nothing will ever be the same again.
     The landscapes of Piero Della Francesca: like fine fawn plush that has been scorched with an iron.

3 May 2003, Padua: Museo Civico
A wonderful series of panels depicting angels: dark grounds of indigo blue/black with the figures glowing against them; fantastic wings, striped in bands, the best in layers of topaz, steel, cobalt and carnelian. Some appear to hold small figures (anima, or souls) cradled in white napkins, and the effect is that of them operating glove puppets. I like the idea of a heavenly puppet show.

11 November 2003
Walking home through the park this evening was alarming. The air was a maelstrom of flying leaves and twigs. Trees swayed and trembled in the storm as the wind roared through them like a great beast. The noise was deafening. Large pieces of branches littered the path and there seemed a real danger of being hit by debris. It wouldn’t have been surprising to see whole trees come down. A massive Scots Pine cracked so ominously that I hurried past to get clear of it. I was glad to be through the front door and into the warmth and security of home.
    The past week has left me feeling somewhat shell-shocked, and the journey home through the storm felt un-nervingly like an outward manifestation of the turbulence I’ve been experiencing in the studio! This year has seen grave events for too many of our friends. A marriage of much admired longevity has collapsed in ruins, and a kindly man’s admirable life has been unravelled. But there has been nothing more cataclysmic than the unexpected death of our friends’ infant son.
    It’s been hard to watch people we love and admire struggling with such horrors, and there have been moments when we’ve despaired of finding words to comfort them. First thing each morning I walk to the studio where I spend the day in front of the easel immersed in the business of constructing images. In retrospect, I suspect that with these paintings I may have harnessed too rigorous a formality to make sense of the sadness which has a grip on my heart. It’s as if I’ve been endeavouring to build walls to hold back chaos, and now that something raw has begun to seep through the cracks, I’m not sure whether the outcome will be meltdown or breakthrough.

15 November 2003
It isn’t as though I’m not satisfied with the paintings that I’ve made so far. Many of them are fully worked up details of larger paintings not yet started. All will be suitable for showing and they will support the eight major works planned. The first of those eight, The Ascent of Angels, has just been completed, and because I’ve never before made a work containing the multiple narrative incidents which are a feature of nearly all the Christ Church fragments, I’ve been painstaking with it. While I feel the painting achieves the qualities I envisaged when I began it, I’m not at all sure I want to pursue another seven in the same way.
    As with any creative endeavour, when embarking on a painting there comes the point at which most of the possibilities have to be jettisoned so that work can develop the remaining, carefully selected ideas. This might be called by some “the point of no return”, but that would be simplistic because paint has a life of its own, and no matter how well planned a project is, massive changes can and do take place during the painting stage. Creative upheavals carry the artist to unexpected places, and the finished painting may end up being far from what was originally envisaged. This is good. It’s what makes the process both unpredictable and exhilarating. It can also result in despair. It’s always been important to me that no matter how technically good I may get at the business of painting, I continue to lay myself open to the currents which carry me in new directions. “Learn and unlearn” has become a kind of mantra. Every time I reach a point where skill becomes even close to practised and reliable, I feel an urge to derail the train!
    But Peter came to the studio last week. His comments about The Ascent of Angels made me realise that this painting has been an important turning point, rather than the settled direction for the series. In fact the seed of my dissatisfaction had germinated some time ago. It would have come up through the tarmac at some point! Peter in the meantime took the full brunt of my wrath for being the bearer of bad news. Later he had the grace, and perhaps the good sense, not to look smug when he was proved right.

16 November 2003
I’ve been talking to Glenys Cour, who phoned this morning. I told her about my difficulties and the sudden upheaval of my feelings toward the work in the face of the pressing deadline. Many people, knowing that I am tackling a fairly ambitious project with The Temptations, expressed horror at the short time left to me even before this crisis! Glenys alone of anyone I’ve spoken to throughout the project said “Oh, you’ve got until March! You’ve plenty of time!”. There was a moment of shocked silence, of the unspeakable having been spoken. Then we both roared with laughter. But she’s right. Of course I’ll get it done in whatever time remains. This is the shake up I needed.

24 November 2003
I’ve laid out a new version of The Ascent of Angels - jettisoning the angels completely, and with the lions and the body of St Paul enlarged and pushed higher into the picture plane. Less landscape.
    It occurs to me that my abiding interest in narrative painting lies not so much in the telling of stories as in the relationships between people; or in the case of the painting Embrace, between a man and an angel. Here, the figures grapple with each other in close up: no background other than a stark field of cadmium red; nothing to distract. I keep coming back to it. The angel’s profile blazes with intensity although the man’s face is impassive. But the unified shape the bodies make is like a puzzling question, and it seems that if you look at it for long enough, the answer may be made clear; except of course that it never will. Information has been rationed….
    No reason of course why such an encounter cannot take place within a landscape, and no reason why the figures should fail to register a strong impression on any viewer if rendered on a smaller scale within a larger painting. After all, the Christ Church fragments are full of tiny and compelling figures undergoing extraordinary events within wide landscapes. But their overall small scale requires the viewer to move in and look closely in much the same way as when examining a picture in a book. Having to do this to see what’s happening creates a feeling of discovery. The attention is grabbed physically. The same thing happens mechanically in cinematography with the zoom. The viewer is alerted to the possibility of something which will be interesting and rewarding. I haven’t thought about this much in the past, but grappling with the Oxford fragments has made me much more conscious of how scale in paintings dictates the physical response.
     Perhaps decades of sitting at fixed points in darkened cinemas has blunted the willingness of the average viewer to engage with paintings by adjusting their positioning and finding the optimum viewing point. Perhaps that’s why people drift past paintings in galleries in a daze, anaesthetised by a physical weariness that they never feel when bombarded with visual images in the comfort of a plush seat. Even television screens are getting bigger and bigger. And so perhaps I shouldn’t be working on this larger scale at all, but forcing viewers to engage by painting tiny, densely detailed, multiple narrative compositions - just like the Oxford fragments!

28 November 2003
A good week. Three more drawings laid out pretty comprehensively ready to start painting. The Man Who Lived in a Tree, The Penitent Scorched by the Sun and The Righteous Man Surprised by the Devil.
    The Righteous Man Surprised by the Devil has been the cause of endless trouble recently, with many false starts. The Devil has undergone multiple changes of form and personality, but has now arrived at an appearance derived largely from Romanesque sources. In this final version, the righteous man is in awkward mid-fall, caught at the ankles by the Devil emerging through the ground.
    In Boticelli’s painting The Mystic Nativity, the demonic hoards are vanquished on the Day of Judgement and can be seen disappearing back into Hell through a flowery mead on which angels embrace the righteous men of this world. A postcard of a detail from the painting has been on a wall of the studio for a long time, and has already been the inspiration for two preparatory paintings of an angel embracing a man. Now I’ve taken its imagery of a verdant field of flowers harbouring evil, and the result is oddly unsettling. A fruitful bounty of borrowing from a postcard of a detail!

29 November 2003
Today I’ve very nearly completed another drawing on panel, The Beating of the Falsely Accused. Like The Penitent Roasted by the Sun, this one is set in Aberporth. I made the background study for it last weekend: the view across the valley and up to the chapel on the horizon. Not quite finished. I think that I should probably include the woman whose lie ignites the drama, but I haven’t got a clue how to do her yet.
    I think that I might add a dog into The Righteous Man Attacked by the Devil. Probably Rugrat. The two figures in the background are oblivious to the drama and go about their business, but the alert little dog has noticed. What happens next? Rugrat would have bitten the Devil on the ass!
    Five drawings down and three to go. All so far are in portrait format -unusual for me, but the shape has engaged me and paved the way to some interesting compositional devices. In each of the five the main focus of action is in the foreground, and only in The Righteous Man thus far is the eye carried into the background and to the activities of distant figures. This is not like the Oxford fragments at all, where some of the single panels seethe with narrative events. But I think that when painting on the scale that I’m attempting here, too many episodes within a single frame create possibilities of visual overload. That’s something which doesn’t happen with the altarpiece fragments, because the onlooker has to be close to see them at all, and then they can be read like illustrations.
    On keeping a record of good ideas - ignore nothing! Not the upturned orange plastic laundry basket in Nestor’s garden, nor the blue milk-crate placed as a step to reach the bird-feeders, the carrier bag impaled on the hedgerow thorns, or the stacks of glazed frames awaiting next year’s seedlings. Make notes or sketches as reminders of the little everyday strangenesses, like the old man looking in the book shop window last week, conservatively if slightly shabbily dressed, but with a zipped nylon anorak hood perched incongruously on top of his head like a Phoenician cap.
    The simplest thing can provide the salvation of a painting. Don’t imagine for one moment that all can be stored mentally for later retrieval. Keep a back up!

3 December 2003
Three days into The Man Who Lived in a Tree, and the painting is beginning to pull together. I’ve dropped some of the planned foreground detail because I want the work to be bold.
    Peter and I met William Gibbs for lunch today. He told us that he went to the Bill Viola exhibition in London. This is one show I really wanted to see, but time is against me. William loved it, and said that people sat in front of single works for twenty minutes or more, so compelling were they. I’ve enormously admired what I’ve seen about the exhibition, and that’s without even experiencing the work as the artist intended.

10 December 2003
Still not finished The Man Who Lived in a Tree. I paint and repaint, day in and day out. It’s grindingly hard endeavour, trying to catch the moment, pull together disparate passages of paint, adjust colour, release form, tell the story, hold the idea and conjure the mood, even when I’m clumsy and inept and spoil things. Richard and Montserrat dropped by the studio at tea time yesterday. Their arrival was a relief from the struggle of painting, and Richard’s comments about the work as it loomed on the easel began to convince me that I was on the way. My own judgement was addled by tiredness. As we all walked back to Plasturton Gardens together afterwards, he told me that the painting was haunting him. He said that the faces in the paintings and in the studies on the walls of the studio reminded him of Giotto! He couldn’t have found anything better to make me happy.

19 December 2003
Sigrid has e-mailed me Saint Kevin and the Blackbird by Seamus Heaney. With all our talks of saints in their cells and the privations of the holy life, she thought to send it winging through the ether to me. It’s a staggeringly beautiful poem. The words project images directly into my head which are as sharp and clear and complete in every detail as a finished painting.
    Elijah fed by the raven sent by God, was the first subject I set myself when I started preparations in earnest for The Temptations. Saint Paul, too, was supplied with bread by ravens, the ration doubling when Anthony of Egypt came to visit and then stay with him. On Paul’s death, Anthony buried him with the assistance of lions which appeared out of the wilderness to dig the grave. The stories are full of these encounters and miraculous alliances between men and wild animals.

29 December 2003
Ben’s likeness comes and goes. In several of this series the under-drawings have borne unmistakable portraits of him, but I’ve chipped away at his likeness in every painting until it has all but vanished. I’m more comfortable when the saints and angels in this series do not too-consciously resemble my models. I’m not sure why. I think that perhaps I’ve been resistant to the subject matter being hijacked by familiar faces. Nevertheless, visitors to the studio constantly remark that Peter’s likeness is in many of the angels, and I can see something of Ben in most of the hermits - not necessarily in an obvious way, but he’s usually there. Sometimes it’s in the eyes, or the bridge of a nose, or in a gesture, or a suggestion of his extraordinary stillness in repose. For me, the best drawings and paintings come when I’m so familiar with the subject that I need no studies or photographs to aid my memory. This is the case with both Ben and Peter, and aspects of them slip into the paintings unannounced.

2 January 2004
Drawing is the foundation of painting, and I draw constantly. It's the equivalent of barre and class every day for a dancer. But of course there are different types of drawing. Studies made to exercise the eye and hand, which are usually done from life, can include drawings made outdoors, still-life drawings made around the home and studio, and life and portrait drawing for which I have a model from time to time. Everything is fair game. I coerce friends into sitting, borrow objects whenever I see something that I'd like to use in a painting - particularly ceramics - and march into any place, be it shop, garden or interesting building, and ask if I can stay and draw. Most people seem not to mind. The resulting drawings can be densely worked, hastily sketched, or made as scribbles in a sort of shorthand aide memoir. Often these scribbles are unreadable to most people, but can end up being the things I like most, and are kept for reference in the studio (in polythene wallets to protect them from paint). Favourite scribbles go on feeding my work for years. They become touchstones. I get quite worked up if I can't find the one I want to kick-start a painting.
    Sometimes quite complex drawings are laid down as guides ready for painting, which then are obliterated as soon as the brushes get working. Nevertheless I feel more comfortable and prepared if I've gone through the process. It's as though the drawing focuses me and makes the unborn painting easier to hold in the mind, even if the brushwork then completely disregards the guide drawing so painstakingly worked up! These are the lost drawings, sacrifices laid down to appease the gods of painting! Increasingly with large paintings, the only fully worked up and detailed drawings are the ones which disappear under the paint.

4 January 2004
I’ve decided to use a little study I did after we came back from Venice as a starting point for The Celibate Couple Pursued. It’s a painting of a horse and rider, an homage made after having so much enjoyed looking at the work of Mario Sironi. I love his stark, industrial landscapes, like empty stage sets waiting for the drama to begin. His beautiful painting of a horse and standing figure in the Guggenheim had me rooted to the spot for half an hour. I drew it, wrote notes, bought a postcard, glared at visitors who pushed their way between me and it. The same thing happened when I saw work by him in the Pompidou a couple of years ago. He really hits the spot for me.

10 January 2004
Every time I look at what I do, it seems obvious that my paintings are the work of a choreographer. I often listen to music while I paint, and the gestures of painting become a sort of dance as I work the brushes. From the moment I wake up I'm aware of the shapes my body makes, whether while I'm making tea, making a bed or making a painting. Dance does that to you. (The rehearsal room mirror is not for vanity, but the means by which dancers constantly appraise and refine their technique. In this way you become accustomed to viewing yourself as though from outside your own skin, and as the training starts young, the habits stick - or they have for me at any rate.) When I stand in front of the easel, it’s as though I’m preparing for dance class, and the painting is the mirror. I try to stand well, to breathe properly, and to be poised yet relaxed. Maurice Cockrill told me that he has to breathe and stretch before the crucial brushstroke. It’s the same for me. I can’t paint the way I want when I’m stiff with tension.
    One of the ingrained aspects of dance training that has undoubtedly supported me is discipline. I’m as rigorous about my working practice in the studio as ever I was in the rehearsal room. There is a daily structure underpinning my work which means that I begin each morning with a set of goals. There’s no waiting for lightning to strike.
    But beyond all this, I sometimes think that my compositional sensibilities are the result of spending so much of my working life creating imagery to be viewed by an audience through a proscenium arch. The frame is a device with which I am entirely at ease. This is both a strength and a weakness.
    Being a dancer and choreographer prepared me well for representing the human form. As a painter I've never had to worry about how an elbow works or what an ankle should look like. But that in itself becomes an obstacle to be negotiated, and I'm always trying to over-ride the knowledge and find more expressive ways of representing the body. Learn and then un-learn, that seems to be the constant struggle. If you don't un-learn, then you become too slick. In dance you have to rehearse the performers until they can do the steps in their sleep. Then you have to start the whole process again, so that the movements can become spontaneous expressions of thoughts and emotions. It's exactly the same as painting.