New Work — Oil and Cold Wax Landscape Paintings

These notes accompany a new group of paintings made in the studio over recent months. The work continues the preoccupations that have defined my practice for many years — landscape as subject and material, the tension between representation and abstraction, and the particular qualities of oil and cold wax as a medium for exploring surface, texture, and light.

'White Pageant' 90 x 90 cm Oil & Cold Wax on Canvas

Sources of Inspiration

I am captivated by the contemplative nature of painting, and my approach often seeks to evoke reflection and introspection. These new paintings draw on the landscapes I know most intimately — the Fenlands of Cambridgeshire, the forests of East Anglia — but they are not transcriptions of observed scenes. They are responses to place: to memory, atmosphere, and the quality of light at particular moments.

Beeswax, as a natural material, inherently reflects elements of nature and the processes of change and transformation. There is something appropriate about using a material derived from the natural world to paint the natural world — a correspondence between medium and subject that feels right, even if it is not always consciously intended.

Technique and Surface

The textural qualities of cold wax encourage extensive mark-making and the exploration of surface irregularities. While fully capturing or replicating the intricate details of the forest or the fenland is neither possible nor the aim, the medium allows for a kind of equivalence — a surface that carries something of the physical character of the landscape, its layering, its depth, its resistance to easy reading.

Each painting is built up through successive applications of paint and wax, then scraped back, incised, and reworked. The process is cumulative and often unpredictable, and the most interesting passages tend to emerge from the interaction between layers rather than from any single deliberate mark. The aim is a surface that rewards sustained looking — that reveals more the longer one stays with it.