The images which have been turned into these paintings gave me the opportunity to compose with colour, form, line, pattern, and texture -and to create landscapes of particular times and places, which will, I hope, afford the person viewing these pieces an opportunity to reconnect with their own similar experiences of the natural world.

Harold Town, writing about the landscape paintings of J.E.H. MacDonald commented that the work “gave a sense of the dynamic link between man and nature.” There is, in that link, the possibility of delight, pleasure and restoration. I paint landscapes because I must, and because I love being outside, in nature -it gives and has given me joy, and joy should be shared.

Far better than I can express, the best, and most thoughtful analysis of the complex relationship between the experience of nature and the remembrance of that experience was written by William Wordsworth:

“For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.”

Excerpted from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798