Fifty Years of Landscape Painting — A Reflection
- peter corr
- Sep 4, 2023
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 12
For over fifty years I have been painting — in different countries, across different phases of life, and through a succession of approaches that have each left their mark on the work I make now. Looking back across that span of time, what strikes me most is not the continuity of style but the continuity of preoccupation: a persistent interest in landscape, in the qualities of light and surface, and in the tension between what is seen and what is felt.
The Forest Landscapes
A significant phase of my work has been devoted to the forest — to trees as subject, structure, and symbol. An artist residency in the New Forest served as a catalyst for this work; many of the pieces from that period are executed on a large scale, using palette knives, cold wax, and oil paint, with a close attention to the tactile qualities of the landscape.
The palette knife becomes an extension of the hand, allowing paint to be layered and sculpted with a directness that brushwork rarely permits. In these forest paintings, colour moves from the deep, earthy greens of the forest floor to the golden ochres that filter through the canopy. The aim is not description but immersion — a sense of the physicality of being inside a forest, surrounded by vertical rhythms and shifting light.
The Fenland Landscapes
Now based in Ely, Cambridgeshire, much of my current work is a response to the landscape of my immediate environment — the Fenlands. In both painting and photography, I am drawn to the vast and ever-changing vistas of this strikingly unusual terrain, where light and texture take centre stage.
This phase of my work represents a shift towards a more restrained approach. The Fenlands resist the picturesque; their beauty is understated, their palette muted. Greens, blues, and gentle earth tones combine in compositions that have a meditative quality. The paintbrush replaces the palette knife here, creating illusionistic surfaces and rhythmic intervals that reflect the measured pace of the landscape itself.
The Fenland Sky
Capturing the vast Fenland sky represents a natural progression in this body of work. I allow the sky to become the single focus of attention — the dominant element around which everything else is organised. These paintings have a dreamlike quality, paying homage to the surrealist preoccupation with clouds and the infinite. The sky in the Fens is unlike the sky anywhere else: it is enormous, active, and constantly changing, and it demands to be taken seriously as a subject in its own right.
Fifty Years
Fifty years of painting is a long time, and I am aware that the work has changed considerably over that period. What has not changed is the underlying impulse: a desire to make something that is genuinely felt, that carries the weight of experience, and that offers the viewer something more than a record of what was seen. The landscape remains the constant reference point — not as a subject to be transcribed, but as a field of forces, memories, and sensations that the painting attempts to hold.
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