After the Wildfires: Finding Hope in a Changed Landscape

Sometimes an artist visits a landscape looking for inspiration. On other occasions, the experience becomes about something much more significant.

Recently, I travelled to Pensychnant Conservation Centre near Conwy in North Wales, where I currently have three paintings included in an open exhibition. It is a wonderful setting for an exhibition celebrating a wide variety of artists, styles and approaches – but my visit also had another, rather more sombre purpose.

Close to the centre, the landscape had recently been devastated by wildfire, and I wanted to see the effects for myself.

Art, nature and an unexpected connection

Having work exhibited at Pensychnant feels particularly relevant to my current practice. My paintings increasingly explore our relationship with the natural world: its beauty and energy, but also its fragility and our responsibility towards it.

The recent fires brought those ideas sharply into focus.

After visiting the exhibition – and enjoying a rather lovely piece of cake! – I headed out towards the area affected by the fire.

Seeing a damaged landscape in photographs is one thing. Standing within it is quite another.

The effects of the fire were stark and, in places, devastating. But as an artist, my instinct was to stop, look and record what I was experiencing.

Drawing the landscape with its own charcoal

I began making a quick study on location.

One of the most significant parts of the process happened almost by accident. Amongst the burnt vegetation was charcoal created by the fire itself, so I picked up a piece and began drawing with it.

There was something incredibly powerful about using material taken directly from the site to record the landscape that had produced it.

The marks were immediate, rough and imperfect – exactly what I wanted. This wasn't the moment for a carefully observed landscape drawing. I wanted to capture something of the rawness of the place and my response to standing there.

I brought a little of the charcoal away with me, too, so that the physical landscape can continue to play a part as I develop the work in my studio.

Can devastation become something positive?

The study I made that day is very raw, but it isn't intended to be a finished artwork.

It is the beginning of a much larger creative process.

One of the questions I came away with was: how can I take something as destructive as wildfire and create a painting that ultimately speaks about hope?

I don't want to make a beautiful painting that simply ignores what happened. Nor do I want the finished work to be solely about destruction.

Nature is constantly changing. Landscapes are damaged and altered, but they can also regenerate. New growth appears. Habitats recover and life begins to return.

That cycle of destruction, renewal and resilience is something I want to explore through the painting.

From observation to abstraction

Back in the studio, this location study will become one of the starting points for a new semi-abstract landscape painting.

I will work from the marks I made at the wildfire site, photographs, the charcoal I collected and, perhaps most importantly, my memory of being there.

Rather than recreating the landscape literally, I want to translate the experience through colour, expressive mark-making, pattern and abstraction.

My recent work has increasingly incorporated sacred geometry and patterns found within nature, and I am interested in how those underlying structures might interact with the more chaotic visual language of fire.

There is an interesting tension there: order and disorder, permanence and change, destruction and regeneration.

Looking towards hope

Despite the devastation I witnessed, I want the finished painting to look forward.

Our relationship with the environment is complicated. We are part of the natural world, yet our actions can have profound consequences for it. Through my paintings, I increasingly find myself exploring that relationship rather than simply celebrating beautiful landscapes.

But I also remain an optimistic painter.

For me, colour, pattern and the act of creating something new can offer a way of thinking about possibility and renewal.

So this charcoal study is just the beginning.

I'll be sharing the next stages as I take these raw marks from the Welsh landscape back into my studio and begin transforming them into a much larger painting – one that acknowledges the devastation of the fires while searching for something positive within what comes next.

You can watch the accompanying video to see my visit to Pensychnant, the exhibition and the moment I begin drawing at the wildfire site.

And if you have the opportunity to visit Pensychnant Conservation Centre, the open exhibition is well worth discovering, with work from many different artists across a wonderful range of styles and genres.