As a painter I find myself continually struggling with a sense of time and place. I tend to feel a demand that my studio be a sort of institution, that it somehow create a specific where and when. Maybe I feel that it should promise its own land. I mainly paint landscapes here as I vainly try to think about history.

Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is notable in that it is situated between different outlandish places and times, Sicily and Bohemia, a first part in one time and then a second fifteen years later when a child has grown. I recognise the sense of implicit journeys between horizons and the life of duration that brings the tale together.

A tale of one season that takes us between radically different climates and lands, paradoxically roots us in a kind of vividly invented nowhere of leaving and arrivals. In our lands of climate change nowhere is the same again. The scale of Shakespeare's outlandish ambition puts us in the realm of a changing mind.

Time speaks.

Phil King holds an M.A. in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London (1993) and a B.A. in Fine Art (Painting) from Bath Academy of Art / Bath Spa University (1987). He runs Atelier King Lourdes and is an editor at Turps Painting Magazine and MASS Sculpture Magazine. His recent exhibitions include Palace of Congres, Lourdes (2026), and Vivienne Roberts Projects, London (2023), with earlier exhibitions in London, Scarborough, Cardiff and internationally.