For the first ten years of my painting journey, I mostly created oil paintings and watercolours of wildlife. But recently, I’ve almost exclusively switched to painting landscapes. I wanted to share my reasons why, and compare my thoughts on the two.
Why the change to exclusively landscape painting?
The allure of landscape painting had been pulling me in slowly for perhaps the last few years. I blame my honeymoon in Patagonia, and if you’ve followed my blog or my art at all you’ll know I’m obsessed with mountains. Then there was the stunning autumn light in Kochel, Germany.
Patagonia
Kochel am See, Germany
Back home, squeezing studio time in wherever I could between work and parenting and generally trying to be a present and pleasant human being, Monet taught me the dynamics of light, and how the subtlest shift of hues can transform the landscape from quiet contemplation to brooding, moody, icy.
Caspar David Freidrich taught me to love the vast openness of the lonely landscape. And taught me how to use the elements to craft a deeper meaning.
Then there’s Landseer, Kyffin Williams and the master himself: Turner – the great British artists that cemented my love of my home country, inspiring me to pursue my travels closer to home.
But it was my 2023 trip to rugged, legendary Scotland that convinced me that landscapes were the way forward. Being able to experience painting the Scottish highlands in person, the softest, tiniest breath of snowflakes, the deep craigs and cliffs and the often haunting stories of dangerous climbs, massacres and battles. Being able to paint it plein air allowed me to capture that instant spirit of the place, which I’d not done so often before. Painting outdoors for me used to mean venturing into the yard or on the roof to paint in the sun, but experiencing the authentic landscape without it being distorted, flattened and muted by the camera was worth every blister and the wind-numbed fingers.
Mountain Heather, Glen Coe, Scotland
The joy of landscape painting is that I can manipulate the scenes I capture in photographs or the memories and sensations to create the scenes, compositions, form, line, scales I want.
I can change the seasons, I can even turn a clear, uninspiring white sky into a stormy maelstrom if I wanted. If I want to add, or remove, I can. Doing all of this, the landscape still retains its essence, but I inject a little bit of my own awe into it.
Since returning from Scotland, I have had a flurry of ideas (and not enough canvases to put them on) and have been able to fill up a sketchbook in less than a month, and produce 10 small paintings. That’s more art than I’ve been able to produce in the last year. It just flows.
Just some of many inspired by Scotland
There’s beauty in creating these miniature paintings or small works on board or paper over just a day or two, and doing it consistently. It forces me to keep looking for new inspiration in the same places. How can I tackle the same scene in a new way? What nuance of light or weather, what mood do I want to try today?
I’ve also started to focus more on my sketchbooks, working in a single sketchbook for a single ‘genre’ such as Sketching Scotland or The Blue Land (my sketchbook from the Kochel trip), focusing in recreating the same scene in multiple limited colour palettes, working up dozens of little thumbnail and notan sketches. If I want to change something in a composition, I can just draw some more thumbnails!
That’s not to say I won’t delve back into wildlife art: every time I watch a David Attenborough documentary I get hooked on a new species, a new adaptation. But right now, the landscape is quiet, the animals are sleeping, hiding, and that’s okay.
One of my old favourites, Wandering Universe
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