Repeated sixty five times, a single defining image of that psyche, painted in the colours of torment and bliss this haunting image encapsulates a time and place when the world watched on as the American Dream appeared to dramatically unravel, a decade that held witness to the Vietnam war, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of John F Kennedy.

These hand pulled works, named for California , represent the end of a journey that has taken the artist west from the claustrophobic leaden skies of Northern England to the open vistas of the Pacific swell, seen together as one, they mark the beginning of a new chapter, a journey without geographic constraint and into abstraction.

California serves as both a celebration and an epitaph to a lost American Dream.

Robin Barton 2014