When I was teaching at Wolverhampton I asked a student friend, Nancy Davies, what her home town, Burnham on Sea, looked like, since I had never heard of it. She sent me the standard view of its esplanade, a generic seaside card. I played with isolating little areas of it whose colour and attributes seemed to epitomise the British resort. I brought six of these summery and summary fragments together and made a picture from them called (after a line in The Seafarer) Consider Our Haven. From this half amatory impulse a long large enterprise was unwittingly embarked upon. Twenty years later in 1988 I was still using postcards as a source (though by then only sporadically) when I came to paint the portrait of Jeremy King. As a background I had decided to paint a huge version of part of a postcard of his birthplace. This, by accident (should I rather say, 'as I might well have expected'?) turned out to be Burnham on Sea.

Perhaps one day I will return to postcards as source material, though the natural decline of eyesight has reduced the spontaneity of looking and the keenness has gone with which I used to scan the racks outside stationers' shops in search of epiphanies. Somehow, with the tedious rigmarole of finding spectacles and peering close up, the delight and hazard of it is not the same. I still however make the occasional nostalgic renewal of acquaintance as in the still life from a postcard of Victor Hugo's house done in 1990.

I also continue to collect the more outrageous examples of the Postcard Vision, whose precepts follow (as originally set out in the form of a dialogue with one of the most discriminating connoisseurs of the genre, Richard Morphet).

At one time I was more of less resolved to restrict myself entirely to images deriving from postcards. Having claimed that I would find in the pages of A Human Document everything that I might want t say verbally, it seemed that I could by analogy decide that there was no narrative or reference or pictorial element that I could not elicit from a postcard. For a period of six or seven years that was certainly the case, to the extent that one of the original plans for illustrating Dante's Inferno was to use only postcard-based images for the visual commentary.  > >

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