New Forest Residency — First Week of Paintings

New Forest Residency — First Week of Paintings

The first week of the New Forest residency produced a group of paintings that were, in many ways, a departure from my usual practice. Working in an unfamiliar landscape, without the accumulated familiarity of the Fenlands, required a different kind of attention — a willingness to look without preconception, to respond to what was actually there rather than to what I expected to find.

The New Forest Landscape

The New Forest is a landscape of considerable variety: ancient woodland, open heath, river valleys, and coastal marshes, all within a relatively small area. The quality of light is different from the Fens — filtered through canopy rather than arriving unimpeded across flat fields — and the scale is more intimate, the horizon closer and more varied.

The paintings made during the first week of the residency reflect this intimacy. They are smaller in scale than much of my recent work, and more directly responsive to specific observed moments: the light on a particular morning, the colour of the heath in late afternoon, the quality of shadow in the woodland interior.

Working in a New Environment

Working in a new environment is always productive, even when — perhaps especially when — it is uncomfortable. The unfamiliarity forces a kind of alertness that is difficult to sustain in a known landscape, where the eye tends to fall into established patterns of looking. In the New Forest, I found myself noticing things I would have overlooked at home: the particular texture of the bark on an ancient oak, the way the light changed as the day progressed, the unexpected colours in the shadow of a gorse bush.

These observations fed directly into the paintings, giving them a quality of freshness and immediacy that I hope is visible in the finished work.