This post sets out the material composition of the cold wax medium I use — the beeswax, damar resin, and solvent — and describes how these elements behave during and after painting. It is intended as a reference for those who want to understand the physical basis of the work.

In April 2025 I showed a new group of paintings at Fresh Art Fair, Cheltenham Racecourse. The works were part of my continuing forest series — each one an attempt to hold the particular quality of light and structure that draws me back to woodland as a subject.

Gold enamel and cold wax medium

The question of detail in painting is not technical — it is philosophical. This post reflects on how I approach the relationship between precision and openness in my work, using a painting of Eaves Wood in Lancashire as a starting point for thinking about what detail is actually for.

Using cold wax medium with oil paint to create a forest

The question I am asked most often is how oil paint and cold wax work together. This post draws on my current studio practice to describe the relationship between the two materials — how they interact, how I mix and apply them, and what the medium makes possible that oil alone does not.

This large-scale painting was developed over an extended period in the studio, its surface built up through successive layers of oil and cold wax medium. The title refers both to the colour — a deep, saturated green that dominates the composition — and to the sense of enclosure that the vertical forms of the trees create: a vault of branches and foliage that shelters and contains. Surface and Process The work was made using a variety of tools — palette knives, rollers, and pr

This is the work currently in the studio. I have decided to produce a series of paintings based on the VolksPark in Berlin

How to be creative with oil paint and cold wax. Using Jeff Becks guitar playing for inspiration

Cold wax landscape painting techniques

After several years of working with oil and cold wax, I have come to understand the medium less as a set of techniques and more as a set of conditions. This post reflects on what those conditions are, and how they have shaped the way I think about painting.

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

This painting, 'Archaeology of Thought', is made in oil and cold wax medium on a cradled wooden board. It belongs to a continuing body of work concerned with landscape, climate, and sensory experience translated into paint — work that asks what it means to record a place not through description but through accumulation. The title is deliberate. Archaeology implies excavation: the careful removal of material to reveal what lies beneath. But it also implies the reverse — the sl

'One Hundred Years of Solitude' 150 x 100 cm Oil on Canvas

A landscape painting of Thetford Forest in oil and cold wax medium

' The Archaeology of Thought' Oil and cold wax 60 x 60 cm

A Minimalist abstract painting based on water and clouds

This multi-layered mixed media oil painting represents a development of my New Forest series and continues my engagement with nature and land. The surface consists of multiple layers of oil and cold wax, with a marked impasto and strong textural qualities. The gold enamel has a soft patina and mirrors elements of the colour and tone of the immediate environment. Gold has been applied selectively to some of the vertical forms, providing intense points of reflective light again

I have arrived at an interpretation of the Fenlands through working with materials and actually living here and experiencing the...

A landscape painting of the Cambridgeshire Fenlands by the artist Peter Corr