Succession, oil on canvas, 100x70cms
Making a painting of an outdoor landscape is to enter into a kind of quiet partnership with the world. Turning a piece of scrubland into a cultivated place of production mimics the transformation from blank canvas to painted surface; the spade and the brush insist equally on being part of the work. Both ask more than expected, and it is less about control and more about feeling, listening and looking.
With each visit to the plot, you notice more: the way the light strikes differently after rain, the subtle hues of deep green and blue. These small revelations don’t just make their way into the art—they alter you. They sharpen attention, and being with them shows care.Sustainability lives in this rhythm too. If outside in the landscape is your studio, then it is also a place to become aware of lifecycles; think of the way decomposition and soil feed new life. Making is not separate from the living world, but entangled with it, folding image and sensation into paint, mixing soil and seed to transform the land, in both, materiality is held in the hand.
Slowing down to align with the pace of growth is about noticing, giving attention, caring and living with. The patience to wait for produce to emerge, the time for an image to grow out of the paint, reveals that everything is a work in progress, and all of it links and collaborates together.