the road to damascus

Return from Syria again aware that what has been captured in my notebooks needs an out. What remains as I am once again buffeted on the pavements of Istanbul, is a sense of newness, compositions that configure in my minds eye, new sweeps of space, refreshed light and colour. It's a completely abstract sense that has less to do with the great sweep of the red carpeted floor of the Umayaad mosque, but everything to do with it also. Blank canvases await in my studio. Its a relief. The new year weighs in starkly and somehow finding my way into the new sacred geometry I discovered in Syria will be my salvation. I find it not only in the clear spaces and leaping arches of the mosques, but also in the ancient stone cities held in stillness against a winter blue sky or framing a landscape carved out in shallow relief.