To experience landscape you have to walk it, to pace it out and get a grip the suface through the networks of paths, hedgerows, rippling contours – all the lines that establish and create rhythms. I am not a plein air painter. I work in the aftermath of expereincing landscape, looking backwards and recollecting it to forge an image attempting to capture the rhythms and converting that energy into pictorial space. The picture space might even hopefully suggest what one cannot see, perhaps a subterranean underworld. Making drawings and paintings involves process that can be like some geological processes – deposition, layering, stratification, erosion, faulting and folding of ideas into making an image. The process of drawing attempts to bring thoughts to light and bring drama to the surface. Hopefully the outcome is about remembering the light and thinking about whats left behind.
Perhaps the act of looking closely at, and representing landscape, inevitably lures one into the museum of collective cultural memory. Three centuries of landscapes in British art provides the ideal nursery to foster a creative response that can invoke narratives about nationhood, politics, family, literature, and much more. This is in addition to the sheer pleasure of soaking in a landscape vista itself. Climate change, pollution and age seem to be undoing our land, yet every passage of landscape has a story to tell, perhaps about how it has endured or been a silent witness through the ages. I hope my work will encourage more attention on and appreciation for landscape.
I gained an MA at Chelsea School of Art and MFA at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and I have exhibited in the UK and Europe. ‘Common Ground’ at Hereford Museum and Art Gallery in 2019 collected a decade of landscape paintings of the Marches. In 2021, panoramic calendar landscapes ‘Round the Year from Stonewall Hill’ made in response to Mary Rennall’s work from 1967-68 were displayed in HMAG. A digital outcome based on paintings of the orchards at Breinton Springs made over a year commissioned by Apples and People can be viewed online at https://applesandpeople.org.uk/pissarro/. I have organised exhibitions in Ludlow and Malvern ‘In search of the perfect hill’ celebrating the landscape of the Marches and co-curated The Hogback Hills at the Sidney Nolan Trust. Current landscape projects include Ghost Trees at NT Croft Castle.
richardgilbert.co.uk
Richard Gilbert Landscape painter
