Happy New Year to you all!

Coincidentally, this New Year’s Day is also a Sunday, so let’s start it off with art. I picked nature for a topic. This thing we all live in and are part of, but so rarely notice. At least that’s true for us city dwellers.

This time I’d like you to meet two British artists, whose nature works nicely juxtapose. Both paint landscapes. Both seem to be able to grab a certain spirit, rather than just depicting, what is there.

Chris Hankey cycles the coast of Cornwall and paints what he sees.

He says:

“My work is always about nature, or maybe the nature of nature. The process of painting is complex, it is not simply about recreating a beautiful view, sunset or sunrise. Always behind this and embedded throughout the painting process is the culmination of all my life experiences, my thoughts, although sometimes I will work without thought gradually loosing self awareness, entering an almost trance like meditative state, my experiences, my dreams, memories and aspirations. All these things feed into my art.”

 

Lousie Fairchild, a London artist, who also does portraits, says about her landscapes:

“My interest is in the solitude and isolation of extreme scenery, and my attempt to capture the mysterious mercurial nature of the light on the land and sea.  

The absence of human existence is deliberate, to impart a timeless quality of past millennia when our impact on the planet was more benign.”