An eyot is a small island found on a river. With associations of stillness amid passing
currents and immutability when all around is change, this is a useful image to have
in mind when thinking about paintings generally and their relationship to the
surrounding world. But it has more specific resonances as well.

The river is perhaps the most universal symbol of time. Time is what I think my
subject is. Not 'time' in the sense of capturing a fleeting moment, like a snapshot.
Rather, the chosen objects and themes having symbolic properties and associations
which are to do with time. I try to avoid the obvious signifiers of time and its effects
and tend towards those which are more oblique. Some of the symbols which are to
be found within this exhibition include:

- Flora, the Roman goddess of spring, along with her distant relative and archetype of
the ages: the green man. Both are optimistic images of renewal.
- The letter writer addressing herself to an unknown moment in the future, when the
present moment will have passed and the letter will be read.
- The image of the self as both a recorder and a projector. The face records what
time looks like, whilst the gestures and objects speak of how this feels.
- Objects arranged to symbolise the linear and the cyclical.Although these are
opposing models of time, I sometimes think that, paradoxically, we need both the
finality of the arrow and the endlessness of the circle.
- A still life reconstruction of Bramante's Tempietto improbably standing in a
landscape, on the edge of a river. This is a metaphorical visual representation of
something that can only really exist in the mind (a construct).The temple is also,
of course, a place of worship, and we do at times deify our constructs.

This is a fairly diverse list, which perhaps establishes a subject but also begs the
question: 'To what end?'

Since each painting is different and in some senses unique, we must perhaps look
to the overall mood of these works and what might be termed their contemplative
nature, if we are to get a sense of their general thrust. In as much as there is ever
any one 'meaning' where a group of paintings is concerned, I suggest it is to be
found somewhere in this contemplative, reflective mood. 'The subject as something
to reflect upon', hardly a great insight one might say, but we are too apt to allow our
relationship with time to become often little more than a reflex response: counting,
measuring, atomising, digitising, when perhaps there is something to be said for a
more thoughtful approach.

My attitude is not militant, though. I don't believe wristwatches are manacles, nor feel
Augustus's presence over this summer month as being particularly oppressive and it is
no accident that this exhibition falls short of offering an ideology. I think that all these
paintings are meant to be, is a gentle sort of painterly advocacy, or a reminder, that
we can feel time and think about what it means, as well as measure it.

So, to return to where we began, these paintings are eyots in two senses. Literally,
they are static images amid the movement of the world, and metaphorically, they offer
a small contemplative space.The viewer can enter this space and hopefully be offered
some sort of islander's perspective on the river-like sequence of events (the flow of
time), a two handed thing, in both its pitiless and its generous aspects.

Saul Robertson

On a shelf in my studio, there is a wooden arrow.
When I look at it I sometimes like to think that it simply arrived there, that one afternoon it just glided in through the open window and came to rest on the shelf among the other objects that have acquired (along with a thick coat of dust) some meaning to me.
I picture an imaginary trajectory: soaring, climbing, and levelling off, a delicate tilt forward and then the fall.
The line this journey carves in the air.
The wooden arrow is a beautiful object; its form ends in a sharp steel point which, although dark, shines in the light, and draws attention.

I remember, at a point in the past, having to wear a striped shirt and a plastic rectangle bearing someone else's name (Simon). For some reason the memory of those long days spent staring through reinforced glass at a forecourt, at pumps, and banal asphalt surfaces is particularly persistent, arriving to interrupt my thoughts at irregular intervals, unbidden.
I have yet to make a painting based on this imagery, though I think the reason the memory recurs is that it allows the general associations of a petrol station: journeys, stopping off, refuelling etc, to become metaphorical with regard to a period in a person's life.

I mention these things to try to explain how my thought process works.
How something like the idea of a petrol station can be applied to a new purpose, or how an arrow can represent a life span.

I think most of my paintings are about time in one way or another, time is certainly what I think about more than anything else.

I try to think about how time relates to the internal emotional life, to the stream of emotions.
Or maybe that stream could become a sea?
And perhaps there would be something lunar up in there in the sky?
Pulling the tide, reflected clearly in calm waters, or stretched and distorted in choppy seas.

So, reflections then.

Although one thing that might be said of reflections, sitting there on the surface, is that they do tend to be more sombre than that which they reflect.

Saul Robertson