Cambridge Open Studios, July 2021 In July 2021 I participated in Cambridge Open Studios — an annual event that opens artists' studios to the public across the Cambridge area. Open Studios is one of the most direct forms of engagement between artists and their audience: visitors come to the studio, see the work in the context in which it was made, and have the opportunity to talk with the artist about the process and the ideas behind the paintings. The Studio The studio is the

Fields, Rivers and Dreams — The Fenland Landscape from Above Seen from above, the Cambridgeshire Fenlands reveal a geometry that is invisible at ground level. The dykes and drains run in straight lines across the flat terrain, dividing the land into rectangles and parallelograms of varying colour and texture. The rivers wind between them, their curves a counterpoint to the rigidity of the drainage system. From the air, the Fens look like a vast, abstract painting — a composit

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

'Reflections in the New Forest' — Artist Residency Work 'Reflections in the New Forest' is one of a group of paintings made during my residency in the New Forest. The title refers both to the literal reflections of trees and sky in the forest pools and streams, and to the more general quality of reflection — of looking back, of seeing the landscape in relation to memory and experience — that the residency encouraged. The Residency The New Forest residency was a period of sust

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

Concealment and the Art of Christo — A Fenland Encounter Christo's practice of wrapping and concealing objects and landscapes is one of the most distinctive and thought-provoking bodies of work in twentieth-century art. By covering familiar objects — buildings, bridges, coastlines — in fabric, Christo transformed them into something simultaneously recognisable and strange: the form was preserved but the surface was changed, and the act of concealment drew attention to the obj

Futurism, Movement and the Large-Scale Acrylic The Futurist painters of the early twentieth century were preoccupied with movement — with the representation of speed, energy, and the dynamism of modern life. Boccioni, Severini, and Balla developed a visual language for depicting objects in motion: the fragmentation of form, the multiplication of contours, the use of directional marks to suggest velocity. These ideas remain productive for painters working today, even in contex

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

Gestural Painting — Scale, Movement and the Large Acrylic Gestural painting is, at its most fundamental, a record of physical movement. The marks on the canvas are traces of the body in motion — the arm, the wrist, the hand — and the energy of that movement is preserved in the dried paint. Working at a large scale amplifies this quality: the whole body becomes involved in the act of painting, and the resulting marks carry a physical presence that smaller-scale work cannot ach

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

Ely Cathedral from the River Great Ouse Bram Stoker was inspired by Whitby Abbey to write the story of Count Dracula. Had he visited Ely...

Abandoned Farmhouse at Curf Fen Drove, Chatteris The abandoned farmhouse at Curf Fen Drove is one of many such buildings scattered across the Cambridgeshire Fenlands — structures that were once the centres of working farms, now empty and slowly returning to the landscape. The process of abandonment is gradual: first the windows go, then the roof, then the walls begin to subside into the soft peat beneath. The building becomes, over time, a ruin, and then a mound, and then not

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

This is an archetypal Fenland landscape, just near Gold Hill, close to the Old Bedford River. There are no physical hills in the Fenlands...

The Fenland landscape belongs to Winter. In football terms, Summer relegates the Fenlands to the third division or possibly a non-league...

Acrylic on Paper 20 ” x 16″ The geometric forms in Paul Klee’s compositions have always fascinated me. There is a natural rhythm to his...

Ely Cathedral — A Gothic Presence in the Fenland Landscape Ely Cathedral is one of the great buildings of England — a Gothic structure of extraordinary scale and ambition, set in a landscape that seems almost too flat and open to contain it. The Cathedral was built on an island of slightly higher ground in what was, before the draining of the Fens, a vast expanse of water and marsh. It was, in a very literal sense, a building that rose from the water, and this origin is still

At first sight, this looks like a mirror image, but it is a photograph of one of the arrow-straight tree lines seen across the Fenlands....

In the Fenland landscape, the telegraph pole is the dominant vertical. There are no hills, no church spires visible from a distance, no trees tall enough to punctuate the horizon with any authority. The telegraph pole does all of this work alone — a slender, utilitarian object that becomes, in the context of the flat open landscape, something close to monumental. I have photographed and painted telegraph poles many times. They appear in the Fenland series repeatedly, not as s

Surreal Vision in the Cambridgeshire Fenlands The Cambridgeshire Fenlands have a quality that is, at certain times and in certain conditions, genuinely surreal. The flatness of the terrain, the enormous sky, the way the horizon seems to recede as you approach it — these are qualities that resist the ordinary categories of landscape description and that invite a different kind of looking. The Fens are not picturesque; they are strange. Surrealism and Landscape The Surrealists

Fenland Farm Buildings at Hale Fen — Landscape Photography The farm buildings of the Cambridgeshire Fenlands occupy a particular place in the visual character of this landscape. Isolated, functional, and often in various states of repair, they punctuate the flat terrain with a directness that is entirely in keeping with the utilitarian spirit of the Fens. At Hale Fen, this quality is especially pronounced: the buildings sit low against the sky, their forms simplified by dista

Ely Cathedral in Winter Fog — The Ship of the Fens Ely Cathedral is known as the Ship of the Fens — a name that captures both its scale and its relationship to the flat landscape that surrounds it. Seen from a distance across the fields, it appears to float above the horizon, its towers rising from the mist like the superstructure of a vessel at sea. The analogy is not merely poetic: the Cathedral was built on an island of slightly higher ground in what was, before the draini