Where Do I Fit In?

So what? What has all this to do with me or my paintings? Well, no perceptions are natural. No understandings are instinctive. All is learned, informed. We do well to inform ourselves about our activities; as much for painters as anyone else. It has been well said that 'the unexamined life is not worth living.' So the artist must examine his practice and the history of his experiences. Instinct is no longer enough - if it ever was.

So it is important for me, as a part of the English landscape painting tradition, to understand what has gone before and what its influence has been - and is still. For what has gone before shapes what we see today and how we represent it. No serious landscape painter can open his sketch book without being aware of, say, Turner looking over his shoulder.

Moving to the Yorkshire Dales a few years ago has lent an extra dynamic to my preoccupation with the landscape. Living as I now do on the edge of the Three Peaks country of Ingleborough, Whernside and Penyghent, I have become increasingly taken by the grandeur and sweep of these great prospects. And by the endless changeability, rhythm and movement of the landscape and the overarching sky. I have begun to focus more closely on those aspects of the landscape I experience when out walking the hills, especially by the dramatic way in which one can be suddenly overtaken and swallowed up by weather. The landscape disappears, reappears, is lost, regained. The transient, fleeting nature of sense impressions is often overwhelming . . . flickering light, glimmers of sun, enveloping mists, the clouds' scurrying shadows, buffeting wind, rainwater on the face . . .

Yet there's a feeling of permanence, too, in the solid limestone rocks and the bulk of the hills. Behind the fragmented and bewildering assaults on one's senses there lies the underlying stability of geology, hard and unyielding.

This collision between the eternal and the ephemeral is a good subject for a painter.