'Borderlands' — Oil and Cold Wax on Canvas

'Borderlands' takes its title from the quality of the Fenland landscape as a threshold — a place between states, between land and water, between the natural and the man-made, between the familiar and the strange. The Fens are, in many ways, a borderland: a landscape that occupies the space between categories, that resists easy description, and that rewards the kind of sustained, attentive looking that painting demands.

The Painting

The work was made in oil and cold wax on canvas, with a surface built up through multiple layers of paint and medium. The palette is muted — the greys, greens, and earth tones of the Fenland 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's reference to borderlands is also a reference to the condition of painting itself: the space 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.