MOVING WITH THE LAND - PART 2: Remembering the Landscape

This is Part 2 of a three-part series.

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Walking isn't simply how I reach a viewpoint; it's how I get to know a place. Each step changes my perspective, not only physically but emotionally. The landscape reveals itself gradually. Light shifts. Weather rolls in. Colours appear and disappear. By the end of a walk, I haven't just seen the landscape. I've become part of it for a while.

When I leave the mountains, the journey isn't over.

In many ways, it's only just beginning.

I return home carrying hundreds of photographs, pages of handwritten notes, tiny sketches, weather observations and journal entries. To anyone else it might look like an untidy collection of information, but together they become a map back to the experience.

The sketches, photographs and journals are essential, but they are not blueprints.

I don't sit down in the studio and choose a photograph to copy.

I look through the images, re-read my journals and flick through my sketchbooks, allowing the memories to resurface. Often, what stays with me isn't a particular mountain or viewpoint but a feeling. It might be the moment the clouds suddenly lifted, the strange violet hidden within slate, the slow reveal of climbing through mist, or the silence that followed a storm.

Only then do I begin painting. Once the painting starts everything I've gathered is put away. I don't want to look at the landscape; I want to remember it. The painting grows from experience rather than observation.

These are the things I want the paintings to hold.

Every painting starts with a coloured ground. Sometimes it's a warm ochre, sometimes burnt sienna, grey or violet. There is no formula. The colour simply feels appropriate for the atmosphere I want to build, and before long much of it disappears beneath later layers. Yet it continues to influence everything that follows, quietly affecting the colours placed on top of it.

Fragments of that coloured ground are often left exposed. They become echoes beneath the finished painting, much like memory itself. We rarely remember every detail of a place, yet the essence of the experience remains complete. Those glimpses of colour remind me that memory isn't perfect, but it can still be profoundly true.

From there I work intuitively.

There is no carefully measured drawing waiting underneath. No grid. No attempt to reproduce a photograph exactly.

I begin with broad gestures, searching for movement rather than detail. Large brushes establish rhythm and structure before gradually giving way to smaller marks as the painting develops. At every stage I am responding to what the painting itself is asking for rather than following a fixed plan.

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Memory is a ruthless editor. It discards what didn't matter and holds tightly to what did. A camera records everything equally. Memory decides what truly mattered. That's why I trust memory far more than I trust a photograph.

That is why my paintings are not intended to describe a particular mountain exactly as it appeared on one afternoon. They are an attempt to convey something that is harder to pin down: the experience of being immersed in a landscape that is constantly changing.

Although I paint from memory, the colours themselves are never imagined. Every unexpected violet, muted orange or luminous green has been observed somewhere in the landscape. Memory may simplify a place, but it doesn't invent it.

By the time a painting is finished, it often bears only a passing resemblance to any single photograph I took.

To me, that's a sign the process has worked.

Accepting this way of working has brought a quiet confidence to my practice. I no longer feel the need to to justify how I gather my paintings or apologise for not painting en plein air. Being a landscape painter doesn't require me to remain stationary before a view. My paintings grow from moving through the landscape, carrying those experiences home, and allowing them to settle before they emerge on a canvas. The studio is the sanctuary where those ideas are unpacked, reflected upon and transformed into paint.

When I leave the mountains, I may no longer be walking through the landscape, but the landscape continues to unfold within me. The painting isn't a record of where I've been; its an expression of what the landscape left behind in me.

COMING SOON: PART THREE: WHAT THE LANDSCAPE LEAVES BEHIND - where I explore what happens when those paintings leave the studio and begin to belong to the viewer.