I feel that we have reached a time when our enchantment with the machine age has reached its zenith ,overtaken itself and we are left now to pick ourselves up and try to heal ourselves from the effects of its tyranny.
we no longer even have a culture of mass manufacture in this country . It has passed . We have been through all that William Blake feared for us . when he wrote of London

"I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.
Wm. Blake

The Pastoral paintings were borne out of a sense of wonderment and joy . Like William Blake , in London I felt the chains and manacles imprisoning the joyful spirit that is mans right . I shared his concern and despair at the industrial hegemony that in his day was only just emerging . Production and consumerism was new then . It brought wealth to Britain but the work-place was far from savoury and the workforce far from joyful , although often grateful ,I'm sure .
In 2000 I had had enough of London and the consumerism , felt depressed ,dissapointed and disengaged from my London-based contemporaries who seemed to have fallen prey to the material world.
Living on Dartmoor I experienced nothing short of Divine revelation. I loved the space the air the wilderness .