From Wildlife to Painting: Finding Beauty and Meaning in a Changing Landscape

My latest painting began not in the studio, but in a landscape dramatically changed by wildfire.

A few weeks ago, I visited the area around Conwy in North Wales, where wildfires had swept across the landscape close to Pensychnant Conservation Centre. I currently have three pieces of work in an open exhibition at Pensychnant, all exploring our relationship with the environment, so seeing the effects of the fires at first hand felt particularly poignant.

Painting from the landscape

Whenever possible, I like to experience the places that inspire my paintings rather than working solely from photographs. Being physically present gives me so much more information: the atmosphere, colours, textures, sounds and, perhaps most importantly, the emotional response I have to a place.

For this new work, I sat close to the site of the wildfires and began making a study of the landscape.

I found pieces of charcoal left by the fire and used some of this directly in my sketch. There was something incredibly immediate about drawing the damaged landscape with material created by the fire itself. I then introduced colour, beginning the process of recording not simply what I could see, but how it felt to be there.

That initial study will now become part of a much larger painting.

From the Flower of Life to flames

Back in my studio, I began work on a metre-square canvas.

I nearly always start my paintings with an underpainting. Although much of it will eventually disappear beneath subsequent layers, it provides an underlying structure and energy that influences the finished piece.

For this painting, I started with the Flower of Life, a geometric pattern created from a series of overlapping circles. Sacred geometry and the patterns found within nature have become increasingly important within my recent work, providing a way of exploring the underlying structures that connect us to the natural world.

But this time, I wanted the geometry to respond specifically to the subject of the painting.

I began manipulating and extending the Flower of Life pattern until the shapes started to resemble flames. The resulting underpainting has become a meeting point between order and destruction: the harmony of geometry sitting alongside the unpredictable energy of fire.

Turning experience into a semi-abstract landscape

The underpainting is only the beginning.

I will now bring together my location study, photographs and memories of being in the landscape to develop the finished painting over the coming weeks.

I don't want simply to reproduce the scene I saw in Conwy. My paintings are increasingly about the experience of landscape – what we feel when we are immersed in nature and what lies beneath the surface of what we see.

Elements of the geometric underpainting will remain visible, while others will become partially or completely obscured. Layers of expressive painting will gradually transform the canvas into a semi-abstract response to the landscape and my experience of the wildfire site.

For me, this process of covering, revealing and rediscovering is an important part of painting. I may begin with a structure and an idea, but I also have to allow the painting itself to influence where I go next.

Our relationship with the natural world

There is also a wider environmental thread running through this new work.

Much of my practice explores the relationship between people and nature – our enjoyment of the natural world, our dependence upon it and our responsibility towards it.

Seeing a familiar landscape altered by fire inevitably raises questions about the fragility of the environments we value. At the same time, nature has an extraordinary ability to regenerate and renew itself.

That tension between destruction and renewal is something I am interested in exploring as this painting develops.

I don't yet know exactly what the finished piece will look like – and that is part of the excitement.

The geometric flames, the charcoal collected from the site, my sketches, photographs and memories are all starting points. Over the next few weeks, I'll continue layering paint over this initial structure and allowing a new landscape to emerge.

You can watch the video accompanying this blog to see the underpainting and hear more about how the work began.

And I'll be sharing the painting again as it develops, so do follow along to see where it takes me.