The Paradox of Landscape
I have been lucky enough to call Oxfordshire home for nearly 25 years. Many of my landscape paintings have been made ‘en plein air’ within a 3-mile radius of the tiny village of Coleshill.
There is something so captivating about going back to the same spot season upon season and year upon year, sketchbook in hand, and witnessing how the landscape changes. What is known becomes unknown in the mere space of weeks. A hedge trimmed here, or a field that had once lain fallow now used to grow a crop.
One aspect of my work that came as something of a surprise to me, was the role of social documenter. I made some paintings of a garden in springtime a few years ago with a lovely old garden shed made of larch lap and a corrugated tin roof. Vernacular and simple. Sadly, that shed no longer exists. It was taken down when I moved out before the new occupants arrived. All that was left were the concrete foundations – on which the new tenants then erected a brand new shed.
And in a large painting of the village, looking from the organic farm down the hill to the granary, with a Dutch barn either side of it, the view has also changed: one of the barns has been demolished to make room for a carpark.
When you sit down to paint a landscape, you sometimes feel you are capturing a timeless scene. But in truth, the painting depicts just one moment in time – a fingerprint of something that will inevitably move on. It’s this state of transmutation that I strive to bring into my work, creating paintings that feel rich with movement, life and vitality.
The paradox of landscape is that everything is changing, evolving, growing. Spring into summer, summer to autumn, then winter and back to spring. It’s comforting for us to rely on it, thorough sometimes this change can be met with struggle. How much change is too much? Was it better before, or now?
Each generation will memorialise a unique version of how they remember their world. My father told stories of when he was a child, when the sun came out and clouds of butterflies would lift into the air from the fields of Lucerne. He didn’t mention though, the backbreaking work of harvesting, planting, and ploughing, all without mechanisation. Or running the gauntlet of the gamekeeper, who kept a very beady eye on anyone trespassing on his land.
Badgers were gassed, foxes, deer, otters, all hunted down. You were lucky to see a sparrowhawk, and if you wanted to see a red kite, you went to the Wye valley in Wales, even though your Observer Book of Birds always opened with the passage on the red kite: “This bird was once a common sight above the streets of Tudor London”.
I made a large painting of a house and barns, “Middleleaze”, and some other works of both of the barns from different angles, the woods to the right of the house, the barns and road leading to the house. Along that road was an avenue of trees. If I painted the same scene now, those trees would not be there: replaced by a row of newly planted saplings. The roots of the larger trees were undermining the road, so all change. But new trees replace the old. It’s just another cycle of countryside life – only on a longer orbit.
The countryside is changing forever in many respects. It’s shrinking to make way for housing developments. Fields are changing shape, coerced by satellite-controlled computers in the cabs of tractors and combine harvesters to develop more efficient, more regular, more economically shaped fields. Nothing remains unworked for long. It’s this almost imperceptible change that I am drawn to in my work.
There are no more clouds of butterflies – but there are red kites, loads of them, due to a re-introduction programme. And there are badgers and foxes, and the otter is coming back. So it’s not all doom and gloom – it’s just part of the paradox of everything changing, everything remaining the same.
