The Lepris project had a manic quality that was countered on a day to day basis by the rose paintings.

Using the same structures of implied negative perspective as the Negate series, these big paintings were monochromatically rendered with a variety of mixed greys. Using a similarly restricted palette is incongruous with objects so closely associated with colour. Consequently, the admission of rigid colour-field 'strips' manifest each panel.

The rose saturates iconography, glamour, romanticism and fiction. It felt inherently risky to tackle such a subject

in a painterly manner for fear of invoking one of these accidentally. Without wanting to make the disconnect obvious, treating the rose-theme within the strict rules of the Negate recipe gave rise to the possibility of some mechanisms that would bring a deadpan quality to each bloom.

For one, the scale is striking. Much traditional imagery of roses depicts a stereotype within the flower structure. Focusing on different breeds of rose for each painting allows the observer to treat each painting as a portrait if they so wish. Furthermore, the large format easily reveals the imperfections within each structure; the lesions within colour or the tiny rips of a petal. These are not the idealised flowers of O'Keefe.

Secondly, the setting of each flower within the composition is explicit. Each flower's presence maximises the available space - forcing its wonderful imperfections on the observer and crowds out any other context that might muddy the waters. The colourless environment of abstract grey shapes is as far from traditional as each composition can allow.

Finally, the colour scheme of each piece disallows any romantic or even organic interpretation. One could easily treat these flowers as if they were cast of lead, or pewter. There is a distinct lack of delicacy among these petals; a weight that has settled into the shape of each bloom

some time ago. Although not possible at the time, an intended direction for this work would be sculpture. A steel rose of similar scale to these paintings would be the ideal companion to these paintings. Ideally, it would be kept outdoors and exposed to the autumn rain, allowing a small outbreak of rust to texture the surface. At this point, it would be moved indoors to dry and have its corrosion halted and preserved.

Roses are immortal - their withering is as much a part of their presence as their budding. No other flower in western art can lay claim to similar presence within our culture. These paintings are response to that dominance - a claim against, and a reinforcement of that floral tyranny.

Time is no bringer of death for a rose. It was in a direct reaction to the slow decay of the roses in autumn, one was selected to be frozen in ice - a vain attempt to preserve a small portion of the subject of this work. It was this single frozen rose that created Lepris.