About

These paintings were all painted outside - a certain number being later worked on inside. What I wrote on Book 3 sums up my feeling about the now seemingly irrelevant art called landscape painting .
Painting and all the arts are situated in a specific moment. The surrounding times matter. Some of the writing in all five books suggests that landscape painting might express our vague sense of loss and unease in an over-populated, urbanised habitat. There is a special pathos to landscape painting's attempt to picture the beauty of nature, seasons and weather in an age that we are told, faces at our hands, a sixth extinction. Landscape painting is indeed nostalgic. Here is my summary of what should occupy the mind of a landscape painter. A landsscape painting MUST be able to provoke in us a strong recall of what is alluded to. Whatever the painterly "bravura", (Constable's dismissive term for mere mark showing off), it must seem REAL It has to have muddy and messy everydayness.