Br. Duncan Art Collection

“I think all my painting looks back to a childhood experience on the North Downs. There was a valley in the middle of a wood; and trees in the middle of the valley; and there were secret places under the wide spreading branches where the light of heaven was broken up and coloured by a myriad of shining leaves. It was a captivating vision, something seen, but almost musical in its nature. This is what I am always trying to re-capture in my painting.

The poet and artist William Blake wrote somewhere that the study of art is prayer, and that means a lot to me. In art as in prayer we seek and we find, little by little, a freely given gift of God, a particle of being, of truth, of light which stirs the heart. In art, as in prayer, the “something understood” is often given in a flash, at the end of the work, after long application.”