I'm now coming towards the end of a painting that's been about seven months in the making. It's a view from Leweston Hill, on the Dorset / Devon border, looking south west across the Marshwood Vale and towards Pilsden Pen.
I find the completion of these landscape paintings to be a very intense process. The way I work on a landscape means that I allow it lots of time to evolve and develop, so I can contemplate how the painting feels and allow dozens of subtle relationships to occur. However, when the painting is almost finished it requires a far more dynamic interaction and hundreds of painterly decisions as I resolve, clarify, articulate and realise the final crucial ingredients.
Why do I make it so hard for myself? I just love what a painting can achieve. There's simply no other medium that can come close to the mystery and beguiling presence of a painting. I love great films, but there's no film I'd want to watch every day, where-as I'd be more than happy to live with a great painting, and see something fresh in it every day.
The reason that I now spend several months on my landscape paintings is that I want to invest them with a complexity that will last centuries. Of course I'm talking here about the complexity of experience, rather than detail. I can go outside now and walk up Allington Hill and look across the landscape, and in that moment I'll feel the same sense of wonder that I did as a boy.
This is why I don't paint 'abstract' landscapes, or those loose/geometric/expressive paintings I see so often; I simply don't believe those technique can do justice to what I see and feel. Making a great painting is a bit like living with someone, and getting to know them over time. The first impression when we meet someone is interesting of course, but you only really get to understand them as you see them responding to life, and their true character gradually emerges.
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