Keith Howden

Landscapes with Handless Man Keith Howden

The material of the Landscapes is apparently an allegorical interpretation and a reconstruction/prediction of Matthews' own life in which curiously stylised industrial or moor-land backgrounds hold recognisable, and, though the treatment is hardly realistic, recurrent figures, animals, birds and 'metaphoric objects.' (the broken stool, the light-bulb, the fly-paper, the white gull, the clock.) Matthews claimed that the main body of the work(s) had been created predictively and argued that in essence and conception and indeed in all but for a few minor points of execution they had been created and completed 'prior to the events they predict.'