I N T R O

The Severn and canals series came out of a winter trip to Gloucestershire early in 2017, and set me two related subjects: the still, enclosed water of the canals and the wide, tidal reaches of the River Severn. It became a series of seven paintings, mixed media on fourteen-by-twelve-inch wood panels, and after the three-foot Damascus Rose panels I had just finished, the change of scale felt like a deliberate narrowing of focus.

The Severn itself made a strong impression. We walked out onto its sands, which turned out to be a foolhardy thing to do: the firm-looking bars can give way to soft mud beneath, and the river is fiercely tidal, the water returning fast enough to surround you before you notice. It brought back a childhood fright of being cut off by the incoming tide on the way back from Cramond Island near Edinburgh.

More than anything this was an experiment in atmosphere. The views are very simple in themselves, huge skies over long, low bands of land in subtle colours, and the real difficulty is capturing their sense of distance without falling back on the predictable, graduated fade into the horizon that the eye knows too well. So I worked instead with scattered pigment and salt, letting the surface break and granulate, and in one of the Severn panels scraped the paint right back to the bare wood, whose sandy tone became the light of the picture. The result is some of the most pared-down and experimental work in these years, landscape reduced almost to a breath of colour and texture.

P A I N T I N G S

 

B L O G  L I N K S

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