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The Four Season: For four paintings that range through the seasons, we begin with bare bones and end with them, the renderings increasingly schematic and disjointed so that the promise of narrative fulfillment is disappointed.  Eddington's stretched realism, so-called, arises through the tensions between colours and forms lurid in composition with the foetid decay of seething life beneath. Gestures at the surface speed by like high-speed underground trains which glide over garbage and rats.

I imagine that a painter rebels constantly against the limitations of pictorial space.  He has only one canvas (at a time) with which he can do eventually one composition, one world to create among a welter of shifting choices each day. He adds, subtracts, overpaints, erases, superimposes, obliterates, as God did for seven days. 
 
This is creation, powerful on the one hand, vulnerable, fragile and always at risk of failure and dissolution on the other.  The creative risk is felt throughout these paintings, world making and world ending.  The artist stands in front of these large canvases, world dominating yet, at the same time, imbedded in a creative process where self is obliterated, as is much of the terrain in these paintings.  For reasons I cannot explain, despite their scenic dazzlement, their striking visual presence, the artist who made them feels as absent as the barely perceptible figures that occupy a small portion of these landscapes.  

The brushwork is delicate, wispy, fugitive, as if the artist might not wish to occupy himself long in these climes, staying only to pass through.  In the painting of autumn there a sense of indwelling, possible inhabitation; the bones are gone and vegetative matter of some sort appears.  But these buds of survival and presence disappear almost completely by winter, leaving bloody smudges behind.

Bruce Johnston