This work was made during a long hard winter up a mountain in North wales in 2011

All the paintings are  36inch by 26inch    In oil, oil based printing ink and graphite

I was living in a 16th Century stone cottage with slate floors and not much heating in the remote Rhinog mountains, surrounded by ancient woodland and valleys and an incredible view of the Dwyryd Estuary and out to sea. That winter I got snowed in. An old farmer took me to get supplies before the snow stuck. So with plenty of food, wood and good Rum I started these paintings and read a book that changed my life. 

The book is  'Wild' an elemental journey   by Jay Griffiths

'The oceans  are almost as old as the earth itself. Oceanos is the genesis of all, says Homer in the Iliad. It washes forward over will be, washes back over was, and washes now over is, brimming with beginningness. In the mythology of island cultures, the sea is frequently accepted as a pre-existent fact, needing no explanation. the earliest birth and the ultimate death meet here. All life, and arthropod and seaweed, comes first from ocean and runs through endless metamorphoses, through soil and river water, via the bodies of animals, the remains of much that once lived return to the ocean, washes out into sea as pale flakes of almost-sucked-out life and falls, marine snow in the ocean winter, marrow sucked from bone till only dust remains, sinking to the sea bottom.'            from   'Wild' an elemental journey