Finding Inspiration at the Laing Art Gallery: Looking at Landscape Through an Artist’s Eyes

Inspiration doesn't always have to begin outdoors.

Although much of my work starts with visits to gardens, coastlines and landscapes, looking at the work of other artists is another important part of my creative practice.

On a particularly cold day in Newcastle, I escaped the weather and headed inside the Laing Art Gallery, armed with a brand-new sketchbook, a pen and a lovely little watercolour set given to me by my friend Lindsay.

I was there to look, sketch and gather ideas – particularly for paintings inspired by the North Pennines.

Drawn to the sublime landscape

One section of the gallery immediately caught my attention: Sublime Landscapes.

Even the title interested me.

The idea of the sublime has a long association with landscape painting – that feeling of encountering nature as something beautiful, powerful and perhaps slightly beyond our ability to fully comprehend.

It's something I recognise in my own response to landscape.

Although my paintings are colourful and often optimistic, I'm interested in more than simply recording a beautiful view. I'm fascinated by our emotional response to places and by that sometimes difficult-to-describe feeling we experience when standing within a remarkable landscape.

So I found myself a comfortable seat, opened my sketchbook and started looking.

The importance of sketching in a gallery

I love using a sketchbook when I visit galleries.

Drawing forces me to slow down.

Rather than moving quickly from one painting to another, I begin noticing decisions the artist has made: the composition, where the eye is being directed, the balance of light and dark, the shapes within the landscape and what has been included or left out.

I'm not trying to copy another artist's work.

I'm trying to understand it.

Making even a very quick sketch can reveal things that I might otherwise have missed simply by looking.

Encountering a familiar landscape

One painting provided an unexpected moment of recognition: an early twentieth-century painting of Dunstanburgh Castle.

The subject was immediately familiar to me because I have also painted this extraordinary Northumberland landmark.

My own interpretation looks quite different, but the distinctive castle ruins create an immediate connection between the two works.

I find encounters like this fascinating.

Two artists can stand before the same landscape – sometimes more than a century apart – and produce completely different responses.

The physical place may be recognisable in both paintings, but each artist filters it through their own time, experiences, materials and visual language.

What makes a landscape painting personal?

This raises one of the questions I find most interesting about landscape painting.

If hundreds or even thousands of people have stood in front of the same view, what makes another painting of it worthwhile?

For me, the answer lies in interpretation.

I'm not trying to provide an accurate record of a landscape. A photograph can do that perfectly well.

Instead, I want to communicate my experience of it.

Colour might become more intense. Shapes may be simplified or exaggerated. Geometric patterns can appear beneath or within the landscape, and recognisable elements may gradually move towards abstraction.

The place provides the starting point, but the painting becomes something personal.

Seeing another artist's interpretation of Dunstanburgh Castle reinforced that idea beautifully.

Looking backwards to move forwards

Spending time with historic landscape paintings isn't about trying to reproduce the past.

Quite the opposite.

Looking at how artists before me approached landscape encourages me to think more carefully about the choices I'm making in my own work.

What do I want to retain from the landscape tradition?

What do I want to change?

And how can I use contemporary colour, abstraction, pattern and geometry to communicate my own experience of the places that matter to me?

These are particularly interesting questions as I continue exploring the landscapes of Northumberland and the North Pennines.

Filling a new sketchbook

By the time I left the gallery, my new sketchbook had begun its life.

That's always an exciting moment.

A blank sketchbook contains nothing but possibility. Gradually it becomes filled with observations, experiments, colours, drawings and ideas – some of which may never go any further, while others unexpectedly become the beginnings of paintings.

My visit to the Laing Art Gallery was another reminder that an artist is constantly gathering.

Sometimes inspiration comes from sitting in a beautiful garden surrounded by flowers. Sometimes it comes from standing on a windswept Northumberland coast.

And sometimes it comes from escaping the cold, finding a comfortable seat in a gallery and spending time looking at how another artist saw the landscape more than a century before you.

You can watch the accompanying video to join me inside the Laing Art Gallery, see my sketchbook studies and discover some of the landscape paintings that caught my attention.