Perhaps ironically my time in the Academy in Florence surrounded by the richness of the Renaissance, was spent only in part undertaking traditional art learning by, for example, the careful drawing of classical sculptures, bones and casts provided by our tutors. In terms of painting, I produced largely semi-abstract works. I had become very taken with the idea of, one reality hidden or lost within another, the spiritual lost within the physical as one example, or in image terms, a reflection partly perceived on the surface of water which remains still somewhat transparent to the surface below, as another example; and how a painting might speak to 2 such realities at once.

This idea had partly formed the previous year while I painted into the background of my Crucifixion painting the semi-transparent hands of the Father coming to embrace His dead Son. The line defining the form of the Fathers hands was carried on the boundary of different planes of colour, without, actually being a line of distinct colour in itself: