Clive Hicks-Jenkins 2003: I soon became dissatisfied with pure landscape as a subject, and I began to place unlikely objects in the compositions. I started with things from around our home. Family china, Staffordshire figurines and small sculptures made by my partner Peter's late father, the sculptor Dick Wakelin. For a long time I avoided the convention of painting objects arranged on window sills with views beyond, choosing instead to place them directly in landscapes, and enjoying the odd effects of scale which resulted from fore-grounding them in the compositions....

As I became seduced by the myriad colours, lustres and forms of china, and as I became more skilled at representing their particular qualities, I jettisoned the stylised approach in favour of something more observed and painterly. I got rather good at Staffordshire, and I particularly relished the difficulties of conjuring likenesses in paint of the largely white figurines with their shiny glazes and dazzling highlights. Portraying them provided me with a series of problems to be solved, and I had to get each part of the equation right, or the solution wouldn't come. I enjoy that kind of process.

An example of this early painterly approach to objects can be seen in Journeys End, the little still-life/landscape painting of my dad's tea mug standing in front of Tretower Castle. I painted it not long after he died, and while I was working on it I began to realise that the mug represented him, and that the painting was becoming a sort of portrait and memento mori rolled into one. It was a revelation to discover that the objects I painted could freight the works with deeper meaning in this way, and that these meanings, whilst not easy to read by viewers who came to the paintings with no background knowledge, could nevertheless help me as an artist to suggest a world beneath the surface of things. And the more I became engaged by the world beneath the surface, the more I enjoyed making the paintings.

John Barnie 2001. "The sensuous detail of the china objects, the clarity of their depiction, foregrounds them in human time. They are not the 'antiques' of the nouveaux riches who in recent years have bought into the Marches and bought up its material culture. The objects in these - Dick Turpin, bizarrely on a white charger, a china cow and calf, a fine lady on a horse, jugs and cups - have all sat on mantelpieces in dark front rooms, hung from hooks in dressers in kitchens, beloved for their imagery of a romantic and mysterious otherwhere - the deep-sea clipper on the glazed blue mug in Journey's End, for example - and also for their association with people, parents and grandparents, who have handled them before you.
They are the objects of family veneration, fact and symbol of continuity, but a continuity which is fragile, like the artefacts themselves."