To know where you have been is to know where you are going.

This painting much like many of mine sets a stage within which the happenstance, the fleeting glimpse can occur. In this instance the valley , mountains and outcrops are that stage. The three deliberately Goya-esque trees are from that valley however not quite in the exact places as they occur here, similarly, the three Ibex. Altogether I must have hiked more than thirty km and some thousands of meters in altitude on several evening at the same time of day to gether all the reference for this piece. After about two months painting it was time to let it and thus the place go both literally and figuratively since it is a highly reflective piece encapsualating almost twenty years of familiarization with every rock and nuance of our former home valley: Barranco de la Abuela.

It was important to me to take on such a big landscape to record a highly emotive and retrospective depiction of a place forever lodged in my psyche and it was to take on the ‘grand view’ in the traditions of the Hudson River School, the humble quotidian view in the traditions of the great Russian landscape painters like Isaac Levitan and Shishkin and render them epic. It was also to address Goya and the Spanish Landscape specifically The Disasters of War, Los Capricios and the Black Paintings directly.