top of page

Closer To Home - English Landscapes

Reconnecting with home

These acrylic and mixed media paintings on canvas are inspired by my many trips back to England and Wales, re-visiting familiar places and exploring new scenic landscapes, from the Brecon Beacons to the rivers and parks of the Midlands.

There’s an essential Britishness, that finds its way into everything I do. Whether it’s the way I instinctively know whether it’s going to drizzle or downpour, to that inexplicable pull to explore the beach, however grim and grey the skyline. We are stoic, stiff upper lip, we like signposts and rules.

 

Yet for all these traits, I find that these are the ones I go up against when I immerse myself in the landscape of my home country. I’m shaped by where I was born, the river and the gardens that have changed immeasurably little, only the growing and receding of the floodplain giving any hint to the passage of time.

Beautiful Landscape Paintings

British Landscape Art Inspired by the Sanctuary of Home

I look away from the signposts and rules, to the empty, the vast, the sublime, the picturesque: the English countryside has been called all this and more throughout the centuries. I look to borderlands, scrublands, in between lands, home lands. Places where I can feel that little bit closer to home.
 

It’s escaping to breathe in the heavy scent of a too-long winter, and equally dreading the appearance of the first snowdrops. The change of seasons feels swift, sudden, and always going in the wrong direction. It gets cold too fast, the frost bites too far through our coats and forces us to scrape and de-ice our cars frantically. Autumn is bittersweet, poignant, but the beauty doesn’t last long enough. Though spring will always come, we will still find a way to complain – politely – about it.


It’s being drawn into the romantic spirit of a gently curved hillside, sprinkled with sheep and cattle and just a hint of summer sunshine. Catching a gnarled old oak in the corner of your eye and muttering “excuse me” because it’s bowed trunk reminds you of your neighbour’s stooped back as he tends his flowerbeds.


It’s yearning wistfully for places untouched, places I have been a part of, shaped by, and places that I am forever drawn back to, like a deer returning to its favourite tree to shed its velvet. I too shed my velvet, leaving little traces of me behind each time.
 

What will I find the next time I’m here?

​

Read more on the blog

bottom of page