Adrian Flaherty Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW have lived all my life, but when I had finished that series, I wanted to explore the idea of living in the “Western World”, and its chaotic and yet usually ordered nature. I work from drawings and from photographs taken on some of my walks along the cliffs of the west coast of England. When I start a painting, I have a general aim of what I want to depict, of late usually laying down string to try and control some of the added paint to mark out the subject. I have been using 27 one meter long pieces recently a lot. I love this number because it is 3 to the power of 3 (or three cubed), which is also the number 3 less than 30. It is an ironical reference to the freedom of the “West”, where most Londoners pronounce this number `Free’. There are also obviously three primary and three secondary colours, so this process has become like my signature method. I use a combination of oil and acrylic paints, thinned down, so that when the paint is added to the horizontal canvas it flows and mixes with other colours from other areas of the painting. I usually have to control some of the flows as I go along by tilting the canvas until an equilibrium is reached or an interesting effect is achieved. This can be seen in much the same way as there being many ways that humans attempt to control some of the impacts of nature in coastal areas as well as the urban towns and cities. This process, after it has dried, is then worked into to bring out, and accentuate various aspects and to try and make the painting as much as possible like the original scene in the photo. It is this process that is often very difficult to end very much like the ongoing need to take care of the environment and the nature that I depict, and I often return to the painting with the common question of when to decide that the painting is finished. There is no time limit only the aim to make all parts harmonise together.