I started this suite of prints when the news was awash with images of the brutal invasion and bombing of Ukraine by Russia. I don't think the prints are necessarily about that particular savage injustice, or even about the general history of humans deliberately bombing civilian populations. It's really about the perverse 'Pleasure of Ruins' Rose MacCaulay describes in her book by that name. MacCaulay's London flat was bombed in the London Blitz and her response to the wreckage prompted her to consider and celebrate the longstanding human fascination with ruins over history. Her book conjures the imagination into envisioning ruins of civilizations built on the ruins of previous civilizations built on previous civilizations, like turtles on turtles through a meticulous and poetic documentation. Even as a child I recognized a magic in not just ruins as wreckage but objects in the process of being ruined, growing up on television (such as Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's Supermarionation) and comics that involved visualizing destruction. As a child, virtually no structure or object I ever made wasn't 'blown up' and ruined, and my earliest drawings are of Spitfires and Messerschmitt's shooting each other out of the sky or bombers laying waste to human edifices. There was a kind of forensic delight in childhood toy crash simulations, drawn or actual, considering stresses and breaking points and chaotic resulting scattering of wreckage and ruin. As an art student I later discovered ruins are an integral part of the art historical record, landscape painting is full of ruins (for example Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian), and there is a great deal of compelling 'war art' including war damage (for example John Piper, British). As well, many of our instructors at art college were working artists who lavished attention on renderings of ruined buildings, and people for that matter (for example Eric Freifeld). Later still, working in animation I spent a lot of time observing and appreciating the efforts of especially Japanese special effects animators describing the disintegration of forms. More recently still I became aware of experts in the field of physics and astronomy (for example Avi Loeb) speculating on humanity encountering alien civilizations. A compelling scenario they consider is not to find active alien civilizations but their wreckage, their ruins or even their 'garbage' (for example as in Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's sci-fi novel 'Roadside Picnic' or 'Stalker', the Tarkovsky film based on that novel). If intelligent civilizations exist(ed) space and time might also be filled with ruins upon ruins into infinity. So with this series of prints I'm attempting to give myself over to the aesthetics of damage and destruction, of wreckage, litter, garbage and processes of disintigration; 'The Pleasure Of Ruins'. I came to this subject matter quite authentically so have considerable enthusiasm for it and take great pleasure making the drawings/prints. I feel I could continue drawing ruins, upon ruins, upon ruins, like turtles on turtles for however long might be available to me.