'Reflections in the New Forest' — Artist Residency Work

'Reflections in the New Forest' — Artist Residency Work

'Reflections in the New Forest' is one of a group of paintings made during my residency in the New Forest. The title refers both to the literal reflections of trees and sky in the forest pools and streams, and to the more general quality of reflection — of looking back, of seeing the landscape in relation to memory and experience — that the residency encouraged.

The Residency

The New Forest residency was a period of sustained engagement with a landscape quite different from the Fenlands of Cambridgeshire that have been my primary subject in recent years. The forest is dense, varied, and ancient; its light is filtered through canopy rather than arriving unimpeded across flat fields. Working there 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 paintings made during the residency reflect this quality of attentiveness. They are more intimate 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 water in a forest pool, the quality of shadow in the woodland interior.

Reflections

The motif of reflection — of water as a mirror, of the forest doubled in the surface of a pool — is one that I find endlessly productive as a subject for painting. Reflections introduce a quality of ambiguity into the landscape: the reflected image is both the same as and different from the original, inverted and distorted by the movement of the water. This ambiguity is something that painting can hold in a way that photography cannot — the painted surface can suggest the quality of reflection without being bound by its literal accuracy.