Creating Surface Texture in a Landscape Painting

Surface texture is one of the most distinctive qualities of my landscape paintings — a quality that is both visual and physical, and that is central to the way the work is experienced. The texture is not applied as a decorative element; it is the result of the painting process itself, the accumulated evidence of the decisions and revisions that went into making the work.

Building the Surface

The surface of a painting in oil and cold wax is built up through successive layers of paint and medium, each one applied, allowed to reach the appropriate stage of cure, and then worked again. The tools I use — palette knives, brayers, scrapers, and card — each produce a different quality of mark, and the variety of marks that results from using multiple tools is central to the visual interest of the surface.

The process of scraping back is as important as the process of building up. By removing paint from the surface — with a palette knife, a scraper, or a piece of card — earlier layers are revealed, and the relationship between the layers becomes visible. The surface becomes a record of its own making: a stratigraphy of decisions, each one visible in the texture of the dried paint.

Texture and the Landscape

The textured surfaces of my landscape paintings are not intended to represent the texture of the landscape in any literal sense. They are not imitations of bark, or soil, or the surface of water. They are, rather, equivalents: surfaces that carry something of the physical character of the landscape — its layering, its depth, its resistance to easy reading — without attempting to replicate it.

This distinction between representation and equivalence is central to my practice. The aim is not to describe the landscape but to evoke the experience of it — to make a surface that rewards sustained looking, that reveals more the longer one stays with it, and that carries something of the particular quality of attention that the landscape demands.