'Half Sleep' — The Light Series

'Days stretched calm and plain to the horizon, as though we rose out of peat and will dwindle in a rumour of fog'

Words by Emma Danes.

This painting belongs to a group of works I have called The Light Series. It is a personal reflection on landscape — the landscape that surrounds me, the fields and skies of the Cambridgeshire Fenlands. The painting carries no topographical information: no trees, mountain peaks, hedgerows, or river valleys to navigate. The only compass available to the viewer is their own experience, their own knowledge and personal history.

'Half Sleep' 80 x 80 cm Acrylic on Canvas

Horizontal Divisions

This is the universal language of horizontal and geometric divisions — dark and light, earth and sky in unequal partnership. It is an archetype, a diagram or blueprint, anchored and echoed in our upright stance as we gaze outwards across the land. It is what we have always done.

The Great Level of the Fens

The Great Level of the Fens is the largest region of fen in eastern England. Including the lower drainage basins of the River Nene and the Great Ouse, it covers approximately 500 square miles. It is also known as the Bedford Level, after Francis Russell, 4th Earl of Bedford, who headed the so-called adventurers in the seventeenth-century drainage of this area. His son became the first governor of the Bedford Level Corporation. In the seventeenth century, the Great Level was divided into the North, Middle, and South Levels for the purposes of administration and maintenance.

The flatness of this landscape — its exposure, its enormous sky, its reduction of the world to a few essential horizontal bands — is both its defining characteristic and its most demanding quality for the painter. 'Half Sleep' is an attempt to hold something of that quality in paint: the particular stillness of the Fens, the sense of a landscape that is always on the edge of dissolving into light.