While the final outcome loses the physical shape of the original objects or scene, it retains their colours, tonality and internal textures. The “feeling” of place is there. The beauty of reflections in water remain and even become stronger, for example, in “paintings” of the reed-fringed water of the River Lea.

This improvised manipulation of an image to see what can be done with it is both conscious and unconscious, like the seemingly-random splashes of an action painting. The final image is both the end result and the process of arriving at the result. Knowing when to stop, when the new artistic image is complete then becomes a decisive moment.

Bowdidge pays tribute to his teacher, Jules de Goede, who, he says, made him understand how to recognise the moment when a work was complete – when adding new elements or changes actually became not merely superfluous but detrimental. “When the image is more than the sum of its parts, then it is complete” – this is the dialectical principle which De Goede taught his students at Middlesex University.

“Reading” an image from a surface into depth is facilitated by depth “clues” – devices that indicate that something is behind or in front of something else. Artists have depicted knives, for example, in a still-life, to take the eye into depth, or black to indicate a void. In these digital paintings, the idea of space and movement is created by multiple converging lines and arches, reminiscent of cathedrals and railway stations. We see references to the Futurist art of the early 20th century.