All that Fall - II 
Charcoal & chalk on paper 
220 x 110 cm
1992

Semele
Charcoal & chalk on paper
220 x 110 cm
1992

Sometimes a picture from a newspaper strikes a chord. One cuts it out and it gets buried in the chaos of the studio, surfacing now and then to ask whether it should be discarded or whether it still has some nagging relevance. One such was a photograph which appeared in The Independent of fallen leaves from the vicinity of Chernobyl. Ordered in rows they showed the mutations that oak leaves had undergone in the aftermath of the catastrophe. They had lost their even-handedness. In a random disturbance of symmetry some parts were shrivelled, others distended. Such aberrations would be tragic and frightening in the animal kingdom. In the less sentient world of the leaf (for I could not imagine one leaf mocking an uglier other) a more disinterested form of looking made it possible to see that a terrible beauty had been born. Plato's Theory of Forms would give us the essential sameness of each oak leaf as it strove to emulate the ideal pattern of its kind. Matisse on the other hand testifies to the difference of each example as it asserts an individual character to the point where he can talk about making a portrait of its particularity. These are of course two versions of the same insight. The mutant leaves, however, confound them both: the underlying pattern can no longer be intuited and portraiture would perforce have to yield to caricature.

It was on the day that I heard of the death of Samuel Beckett that I chanced again upon the photograph, now itself yellowed and curled. I remembered my first encounter with his work in the fifties, in Peter Hall's production of Waiting for Godot with its one-leafed tree. Reflecting on how fate draws the strings together (in that I have since painted not only Peter Hall's portrait but that of Samuel Beckett as he was rehearsing the same play thirty years later) various titles of Beckett's works passed through my mind including Come & Go which I had produced at Wolverhampton. As I thought of All that Fall I looked at the photograph of the Chernobyl leaves. Within minutes I was drawing the first of the initial pair of charcoal studies.

Was it coincidence that this first drawing was bought by the Bank of Hiroshima, a name now joined by Chernobyl in the register of nuclear terror?

The second pair of drawings followed a year or so later. Their ruddier colouring resulted from my belated realisation that All that Fall includes an autumnal transatlantic pun.

The same leaves occur in the large drawing Semele where they relate to the incineration of the ill advised queen who wanted Jupiter to make love to her, not in one of his standard disguises (clouds, gold etc.) but as he really was. The earth certainly moved for her when he came as his all too incandescent self. Out of this Liebestod arrived Bacchus. Appropriately for pubs the god of drink was born a crisp.

Work and Texts (1992),  pp. 104-105.