“You’re really not going to like it,” observed Deep Thought (the second greatest computer in the Universe of Time and Space)…”The answer to the great Question… of Life the Universe and Everything… Is Forty Two”.
 Douglas Adams. ‘The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 1978.
Baudelaire in his critique of the 1846 Paris Salon wrote, 'pure draughtsmen are philosophers and dialecticians, but colourists are epic poets'. This extract about the different qualities he ascribed to the work of Ingress and Delacroix, combined with Galileo's assertion that 'The Book of Nature' (the universe) was written in the language of mathematics, using the symbols of triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, seemed to me to provide a synthesis for metaphysical ideas about the abstract nature of form and colour.
In this print I have juxtaposed an alphabet of philosophers with a series of forty-two circles, each one sub-divided into coloured elements ranging from one to seven colours on each of the concentric circles. The circles are under-pinned with intwined spirals (like a Greek Knot) that may, in Douglas Adam's words be interpreted as 'being the arms of the unfashionable end of the Milky Way'.

Philosophers, dialecticians and epic poets is a signed limited edition comprising 5 digital prints on canvass, each one over painted with an acrylic protection varnish and a hi-gloss glaze on the circles.