Nicholas Manning

I believe in ghosts. Both those which wander before this world and those who err within it, passed away from its flickering scenery, or passing through it. I hesitate to say ghosts and should instead speak of souls: liminal states of our being which flutter and glimmer between planes, in a state of ambiguous awareness. Their cloaks are at times transparent, at others marked by an impasto of colour or cream which is more ethereal than material.

These landscapes or environs are not scenes of our world, precisely: pieced together, sometimes, from the fragments and remnants of material places seen or glimpsed—a horizon, a garden, a range of hills, a shoreline—they remain vistas of another world. Some are more the world before, others the world after; others still are a super-imposition, in opaque palimpsest.

They are dreamlike, or rather true dreams, if by dreams is meant a state no less real than the matter of sense, which is itself in no way solid. In no sense a delusion.  

The characters which people these lands recur. There are the Jesters, who both laugh at death and guide the wandering through it, or toward it, all the while partaking of a disruptive merriment. Animals people it—birds, spiders, bears—often with a single staring eye to fix the viewer, in dumb and lovely compliance. Skeletons, with smiles more than grimaces, are here the only solider bones, for we at least may see the landscape through their fragile ribs.

Monasteries and shrines are here without denomination, for there is here no more nomination to be found. Beyond language the statue may emerge, and not call back to any legacy. The rites may be fred from the random assortment of stuff which is too often their history, reduced to the ethereality of objecthood: a candle, a statue, a flower, a carafe of wine.  

This is not paganism, though we have conditioned to see the robed, faceless floating of souls as somehow outside of a defined

After an adolescence when I learnt the rudiments of oil, and sporadic activity since, I began painting rigorously again during my mother’s illness.

Dementia, while a slow passage towards death, is also a liminal state of reality undone: a wavering and quivering of the neuronal fiction, the web of electrical lights flickering haywire or off, revealing the unseen figures in the woods and their invisible lanterns among the trees.

The work of Scandinavian symbolists

They are religious in nature

Edvard Munch, Pelle Svendlund

Peter Doig, Hurvin Anderson or

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These places are no place,