I feel that my paintings show a magical or sacramental vision of nature and of the human's relationship to it.

My visual flashes come to me suddenly and at random, sometimes several a day, sometimes none for a week. They appear like a brief look at a moving film, luminous, detailed and in colour. They rarely seem to have any connection with recent happenings, but sometimes do relate to events from my past. Often however, they are quite strange, even sometimes frightening, but usually very beautiful.

I had these visions as a child, and then they ceased for several years, throughout my teens, and began again, in my twenties.

There is great difficulty in realizing with paint the memory of a vision. I have discovered that the mood of the vision, is most important. If that is captured in the painting, the work comes alive. However to catch what is shifting, luminous, and constantly changing, and hold it, in still shapes of paint, is very difficult. Some of the visions return several times, and this makes them a little easier to work with.

A visionary artist struggles with this problem in every painting, and sometimes I feel that I have at least captured a small reflected gleam of an immense truth.

I don't attempt to analyses what this "truth" is. I feel my job is simply to present to others, these brief glimpses, and let them speak for themselves.

Dorothy Renals