Peter Corr providing a guide to a joint exhibition of artwork with his daughter Louisa Corr at The Old Fire Engine House in Ely

Every painter knows the experience of stalled momentum — the studio that feels resistant, the canvas that offers nothing back. This post reflects on what that state actually is, and on the particular discipline of returning to work not when inspiration arrives, but before it does.

The more I paint images of the forest, the more I see trees as a cipher — a kind of encoding, a representation of something else. This painting finally declared itself to me after a few weeks of alternately applying, layering, and removing pigment. 'Natural Theatre' 120 x 100 x 4 cm Oil & Cold Wax on Canvas Painting as Excavation This is painting as extrusion or excavation — not unlike a sculptor releasing a figure embedded in a marble block, or an archaeologist revealing an

Mike Tyson's remark has always struck me as unexpectedly apt for painting. You can plan a surface, intend a particular quality of light, work toward a specific resolution — and then the painting refuses. What happens next is where the real work begins.

I was recently contacted by a book publisher looking for a suitable image for the front cover of a new title. He was searching for something dark and mysterious to represent the Fenlands — and had come across my photography project completed during the lockdown period. 'Cambridgeshire Fenlands' Photography by: Peter Corr The Fenland Photography Project Followers of this blog may recall the project I completed during lockdown: a series of black and white photographs of the Cam

I have always considered Cubism to be the key movement in the development of contemporary art — the ultimate catalyst, a clean break with tradition and a revolutionary way of seeing, interpreting, and reconstructing the material world through painting. After Cubism, there could be no return to the false comforts and certainties of representational painting. It fatally undermined conventional ways of recording what we see. For the first time, the supremacy of Renaissance persp

The Fenlands of Britain exist in an imaginary space — out of time and out of step with an increasingly homogenised and utilitarian world. They are made up of woodlands, wet grasslands, marsh, bogs, meadows, and shallow ponds, teeming with life. There is a constant visual interplay between grasses, reeds, and water; between bramble, branches, and sky. Slow-moving rivers, lodes, and streams are seen through a tracery of golden arches and erratic parabolas. A rhythmic dance of c

'Fenland' — A Photography Book 'Fenland' is a photography book documenting the Cambridgeshire Fenland landscape — a body of work made over several years, with the majority of the photographs taken during the winter of 2020/21. The book brings together black and white images of the Fenland's characteristic topography: dykes and rivers, tilted telegraph poles, uneven roads disappearing into the distance, and the isolated farmhouses and farm buildings that punctuate the flat ter

This painting was seen in my ‘Cambridge Envisaged’ exhibition in autumn of 2016 in the centre of Cambridge University.

Damien Hirst used formaldehyde; he would have been better served by an eco-friendly peat bog. 'Between Worlds' abstract Fenland painting..

'Days stretched calm and plain to the horizon, as though we rose out of peat and will dwindle in a rumour of fog' Words by Emma Danes. This painting belongs to a group of works I have called The Light Series. It is a personal reflection on landscape — the landscape that surrounds me, the fields and skies of the Cambridgeshire Fenlands. The painting carries no topographical information: no trees, mountain peaks, hedgerows, or river valleys to navigate. The only compass availab

'After Glow' 80 x 80 cm Acrylic on Canvas 'Afterglow' — The Light Series This painting belongs to The Light Series, a group of works concerned with the landscape of the Cambridgeshire Fenlands. It is a personal reflection on the open fields and skies of East Anglia, though the work carries no topographical information to act as a compass or guide. There are no landmarks, no trees or hedgerows, no features that would anchor the image to a specific place. The viewer is left wit

‘High White Fen’ 80 x 40 on Cradled Board (Detail ‘High White Fen’) Detail ‘ High White Fen’ If someone told you that a painting of a...

In painting, unconventional materials generate unexpected effects and unpredictable outcomes. They interact in ways that are difficult to anticipate and impossible to fully control — and that is precisely their value. The reassurance offered by conventional artists' materials can also be a constraint: knowing in advance what you will get tends to produce work that confirms rather than discovers. Deploying unfamiliar materials is a high-risk strategy, but it opens up new possi

The Cambridgeshire Fenlands — Winter 2020/21 The winter of 2020/21 was, for many people, a period of enforced stillness — the lockdowns of the pandemic restricting movement and closing the usual routes of social and professional life. For me, it became an opportunity to engage more deeply with the landscape immediately around me: the Cambridgeshire Fenlands, which I had been photographing for some years but which I now had the time and the necessity to explore more systematic

Two Houses on Ten Mile Bank Fenlands Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967 Diane Arbus Don’t worry, I’m not claiming to have...

Submerged — River Great Ouse at Earith Submerged agricultural land is a recurring feature of the Cambridgeshire Fenlands at this time of year, but the scale and incongruity of scenes like this one never cease to arrest the eye. This image was made near the village of Earith and records the impact of controlled flooding from the River Great Ouse — a managed process by which excess water is directed onto low-lying fields to protect settlements and infrastructure downstream. The

Living Behind an Embankment — Ten Mile Bank Road Ten Mile Bank Road runs along the top of one of the Fenland's great embankments — a raised causeway that carries the road above the level of the surrounding fields and the river. To live behind such an embankment is to inhabit a particular kind of landscape: one in which the horizon is defined not by the natural topography but by a man-made structure, and in which the relationship between the land and the water is held in a con

The Ouse Washes in Flood ‘The Ouse Washes are part of a flood defense system. They are an uninhabited area of nearly six thousand acres...

The House at Southery Southery is a village in the Norfolk Fens, situated on slightly higher ground above the surrounding fields. The house in this photograph is typical of the vernacular architecture of the region: brick-built, functional, and set in a landscape that offers little shelter from the wind and the weather. It is a building that has been shaped by its environment — by the flatness of the terrain, the exposure of the site, and the particular quality of the Fenland