Brayton and Bretton

Released from the demands of a half-acre garden and a two hundred-year old cottage, I gradually began painting more and more. Subjects became increasingly centred on landscape now, mainly in the form of Brayton Barff, (12) a wooded hill a mile or so from our new home. The paintings were in acrylic on small pieces of hardboard; at this stage I didn't have a studio, just a corner of the living room, so large pictures were out of the question. (Size was important, after all!)

In 1986/87 I was lucky enough to get a year out of teaching to take an Advanced Diploma in Art Education at Bretton Hall, near Wakefield; this proved to be a turning point, not just in my teaching (although that was helped considerably) but because I was mixing again with like-minded people and my painting began to develop. I refined my ideas regarding the desirability of first-hand experience of all kinds, for which the experience of landscape was a handy metaphor. Hence the 'splash' paintings (13,14) which show the landscape bursting in through a window.

I also developed an interest in classical architecture and the ways in which its influence has permeated the whole of our visual culture and is reflected in so many aspects of even contemporary living. I began to use classical facades as framing devices for my work (15,16) and linking them with the concept of our memories of an Arcadian Golden Age. (Bretton Hall itself is an example of a Palladian-style mansion in a country park - the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, in fact.) These were works which had as a common starting point the view of pictures as contemplative, as well as aesthetic, objects.