On a Slant up to the Mountain
This painting is either about the communal/public/spiritual space that I encountered
in Taos Pueblo, or the strangeness of being an artist.
From Taos Pueblo:
Kiva = the unknowable. Seeing men emerge out of these pits and become deer.
The floating ladder is partly a reference to Taos Pueblo, but also to the memory of feeling
marooned at the top of the ladder you had to climb to get into my dad's studio in Battersea,
unable to make the "summit".
The trap door - top left - is part history: in the past the Red Willow people of the Pueblo
used to only enter their homes through a trap door in the roof. And part personal:
the trap door that Mum/Dad made for me from the Fife studio down to the old stable below.

"Slant up the Mountain":
The disorientation of being on a scree slope of a mountain in Scotland, looking out over
fingers of land and sea; perspective's gone and you are floating in amongst the landscape.

Just as I was finishing the painting I came across a print by Yoshitoshi
- The Moon And The Abandoned Old Woman - from his '100 aspects of the Moon' series.
It helped the painting come together for me.