The fixatedness of his line, inscribing and reinscribing itself on the bounded plane of the canvas, recording its passage, is fully aware and self-conscious.
There is no tribute to them among Britain's 40,000 war memorials, there are no descendants in Britain because they were refused any right to settle after the war, they were literally painted out of a canvas recording all the nations who joined the war effort, and many of the records of their service were destroyed in the blitz of the second world war.
"The other way is to look at genes as the canvas that records the social and biological history our ancestors went through".
Placing a mineral lick in the centre of a stretched canvas, he recorded the animals' comings and goings in the form of their muddy hoofprints and other, more personal, leavings.
The London-born Stracey, 59, who climbed off the canvas to record one of British boxing's most epic overseas victories, a fifth-round knock-out of the legendary Jose Napoles in the Mexican's own bullring backyard in 1975, says: "The WBC president, Jose Sulaiman, thought Cardiff would be an ideal location because per capita Wales has had more world champions than any other country.
If Pollock crammed every corner of his canvas, should a record of his life not seek to honor that?
"In the mid-Noughties the Republicans gave the Conservatives their "Voter Vault" software — software which allowed them to collect and organize huge amounts of voter data, with records of canvas returns and postcodes," said Scammell.
But the legacy of the Hudson River School is deeper and more enduring than simply the catalog of what they recorded on canvas.
He ran around a hall with a canvas bag up to record the sandstorm though.
The canvas acts as a record of his movement and imagination.
