This series was born from a feeling that my work was losing it's sense for the places that inspired it (the North Western Dales) - certain rules guided the series:

• Local colour only could be used

• One major work to be developed from the experience of one day

• Ingleborough to be visited from as many sides as possible

• The summit always visited

• And always on the 17th of each month - to get the most 'typical' weather (which of course didn't happen!)

The area of Ingleborough with its limestone landscape rich in caves and pot-holes, hidden treasures and wide vistas, has been my major influence for the past seven years. Taking a near-abstract approach to painting results in work that is truer to my experiences, poetic and emotional. You won't see Ingleborough here, not literally, but an intense experience of the place is soaked into each image.

Since completing "the Ingleborough Series" I have at last plucked up courage to become a proper' caver (with Burnley Caving Club) and whilst always knowing of the rich underground complexity of this area only now can I appreciate how vast, beautiful and terrifying it is. It's as if the already endless multi-dimensional dales landscape has gained a mysterious and equally infinite fourth dimension where time has no meaning. The compacted fossils of hundreds of millions of years, hardened into limestone, dissolve in the relentless flow of water. No other rock is so transient. Taken to a logical extreme in the end won't there be any limestone left?

And what of Ingleborough?

I wouldn't want to see the great hill collapse inwards as it's caverns grew too large (though it would be a great spectacle). Impermanence scares me, I favour the solid state theory over the big bang, and I want this place to last forever, it can be a physical ache almost. That and my own flickering impermanence is perhaps, at base level, what this work is truly about.