There is also a more elemental problem at work.
Initially inspired by Iceland's volcanoes, he spent days and nights lurking through Italy's volcanic wasteland, watching the elemental forces at work and capturing unique moments that somehow feel timeless.
As befits the blood-and-mud spattered backdrop, there's much gruesome razor-slicing and corpse-lugging on display: a forceful reminder, you would suppose, of the elemental natural forces at work.
But I think something more elemental and visceral is also at work.
Mummer, the overbearing matriarch, attributes the landscape's fury as evidence of God, a link Hurley is fascinated by: "She believes these elemental forces are examples of God at work, that it is something quantifiable or benevolent even when it is wild.
Chief among them is Edwin Austin Abbey's watercolor and gouache depicting artists at work, "Sketching at Easthampton" (1878), a brushy, elemental sort of image rich with incident.
Brain cells, starting at some of their most elemental components, work together to build expectations, initially about things like light and dark, or near and far, that they gather from sensory organs.
And, yet, whatever the visual influences at work, Mackintosh wove these together, and anew, into a building of immense elemental power.
Beyond the cosmic and the elemental, the work of both artists is very much process driven.
