In 2001 my good friend and collaborator James Merrick created the first Paving Stones. Combining found images from newspapers and magazines with cut-up texts, he arranged them to resemble a graphic novel. Sixteen years later, in 2017, I revisited his idea. Paving Stones II uses images and text borrowed from film, and photographed on a laptop screen. This time each image is given a full page of it's own, and the work examines grand themes, such as life, love, death, art, truth, beauty and poetry, preoccupations traditionally associated with the Romantic artist. The result is almost Beckettian in it’s mixture of tragedy and absurdity. A third volume is currently under construction.