Literature is one of the main inspirations for my work and these monotypes all have poems or plays as a source. Moreover they all depict landscape and are mostly inhabited by the figure of the rider, an image from many of my earlier series of paintings. I have painted riders as ecstatic, combative or wandering through forests and deserts. And it is this last image that informs my Gawain prints where Sir Gawain, on his way to meet the terrifying Green Knight, goes on a desolate winter journey through Wales and encounters alarming creatures and severe cold. The figure in my prints is dwarfed, solitary, surrounded by cellular forms which represent some of the uncanny events of his ride. 

In the largest group of rider prints I have fused the image of the heroic Samurai, taken from films and documentaries, with those of fighters and warriors from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Shakespeare’s history plays and Macbeth. I respond to the quality of vitality bordering on wildness and violence in these plays: the wild energy in nature and in human nature with its tragic counterpart of destructiveness and death. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine elevates its hero in gorgeous language full of reds and golds and whirling, cosmic imagery. What Ben Jonson called Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’ enacts the aspiring visions of the conqueror. However the energy and poetic colour of the blank verse are mixed up with appalling violence and pain. And both the glittering splendour and the dark anguish of battle inform my prints in which mess and blots and smoky layers and rolls of colour undo form and cohesion, in which men and horses, victims and victors, are in tangled conflict. Both sequences of prints referring to lines from Marlowe and Shakespeare combine glamour, brutality and menace and are inhabited by damaged shapes of the wounded, and sinister silhouettes of horsemen emerging from mists, smoke and fiery vapour. 

The Andrew Marvell print, ‘Silver Feet’ is a peaceful contrast to the dramatic furies of Macbeth or Tamburlaine. The poem from which it comes, ‘A Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun’ is, however, an elegy, it is the monologue of the nymph lamenting the death of her pet white deer, shot by ‘wanton troopers’. The deer appears almost like an apparition, a creature of stainless innocence and vulnerability, against a background of dark forest which conveys a sense of foreboding.