Contemporary Landscape Art

My work explores landscape as a meeting place between inner experience and the living world. Working with pastel, ink, graphite, acrylic, and oil, I draw on the forms of mountains, hills, and open terrain to create images expressing a sense of presence.

​

These works emerge through imagination, memory, and felt experience. While they often take the form of landscape, they are not always tied to specific locations, but arise through an engagement with atmosphere, feeling, and the qualities certain places can hold.

​

I am interested in how landscape may be encountered as more than scenery, as something imbued with meaning, and at times a Numinous or sacred presence. The images remain open in how they are met, whether as places, atmospheres, or more inward experiences.

​​

​

✹  ✦  ✹​

​​

​

Through a variety of mediums my paintings and mixed-media drawings explore landscape and the Numinous. Situated between the contemporary and the devotional, the work describes immediacy of experience alongside a reverence for the Earth's varied forms as living presences.

​

In the vastness of their physicality, mountainous forms can evoke a sense of deep time far beyond the span of our own lives. For me, this points toward a contemplative sense of origin, something within us that resonates with stillness, silence, and light.

​

Such places have been a source of lifelong fascination to me, both through direct encounters with awe and wonder, and through their cultural and spiritual significance. Across myth, folklore, and wisdom traditions, these landscapes are understood as liminal places, where the visible and invisible meet.

​

They are not only described as dwelling places of the sacred, but often experienced as such, as thresholds into other worlds, or as beings in themselves. My work engages with this sense of reality, using forms that may feel familiar as landscape, while also suggesting something more that exceeds clear definition.

​

The ink and pastel works have a closer relationship to the physicality of landscape, and to both a symbolic and geographic sense of North. Ink is applied in flowing lines or small marks using a dip pen, whilst the pastel is crumbled and smoothed into the paper using my fingers. The tiny marks in ink or graphite build the mountain as if stone by stone. Paintings tend more towards the intangible aspect, concerned with making visible an ‘inner’ light rather than capturing the natural light of place. I often paint gesturally into a wet glaze, or work in small triangles to build up an image that appears to glow from within.

​

In repeatedly creating these forms I am expressing something of my felt sense of certain terrestrial landscapes, but it is never an attempt to depict them as they appear. Instead, I use landscape forms in an associative way, as a visual language through which to explore aspects of mystical or esoteric experience and thought. In this sense my work is as much about giving form to the formless, and connects to the idea of immanence — that all material form (including the Earth) is an expression of divine presence.

​​

​

✹  ✦  ✹

​​

​

Many of the artists whose work inspires or informs my own also explore relationships between the spiritual and nature, or between immaterial experience and physical form.

​

Contemporary examples include Agostino Arrivabene, Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson, and Anselm Kiefer. Other influential artists from past eras include Cecil Collins, Samuel Palmer, Ithell Colquhoun, and Nicholas Roerich.

​

In terms of those who focus more exclusively on landscape and its emotional or formal qualities, I admire Joan Eardley, Ivon Hitchens, Norman Ackroyd, and Peder Balke.

​

Work by writers, poets, thinkers, and mystics also informs my practice, including Peter Kingsley, Carl Jung, John Moriarty, and Don Domanski, alongside various esoteric and occult traditions.

 

I am deeply influenced by the ancient landscapes of Britain, its folkloric traditions, and practices of magic, which resonate with my own experience of walking and spending time in these places.​​​​