'Between Worlds' — Painting the Cambridgeshire Fenlands

The Cambridgeshire Fenlands occupy a space between worlds — between land and water, between the natural and the man-made, between the ancient and the contemporary. This in-between quality is one of the things that makes the Fens such a compelling subject for a painter: they resist easy categorisation, and they reward the kind of sustained, attentive looking that painting demands.

The Painting

'Between Worlds' was made in oil and cold wax on canvas, with a surface that attempts to hold something of the Fenland's ambiguity. The palette is muted — the greys, greens, and earth tones of the landscape in winter — and the composition is horizontal, reflecting the flatness of the terrain. The horizon line is low, giving the sky its characteristic dominance.

The title refers not only to the physical character of the landscape but to the experience of painting it: the state of being between the observed world and the painted one, between intention and accident, between control and surrender. This is the condition in which the most interesting painting happens, and it is the condition that the Fenlands, with their particular quality of openness and exposure, seem to invite.