New year - new landscape

How quickly does a landscape get under your skin? For me it takes a while. I’m still painting the Scottish landscape I explored while on sabbatical five years ago. It’s still in my mind and my body and it’s in the colours and shapes that come out in my paintings. I can still walk the walks in my mind and see its characteristics vividly. Having lived in rural Wales for the years since, I now have that landscape in me too; the high spaces and dark forests, the rocks and rivers. Now I’ve moved to Devon and I have a new landscape to explore. It’s smaller and softer, more tamed and farmed. But there are shapes and motifs that are starting to work their way in. I’m enjoying the chalk quarry pits I keep stumbling on, often overgrown with trees. There are hill forts and soft patches of woodland, and wide sweeping vistas to the sea. Then there are the fossils and pebbles of the Jurassic Coast; a whole new alphabet of marks and motifs to play with.