The following article first appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of Green Pebble magazine (www.greenpebble.co.uk). Published with permission.

When Chris Dobrolowski created Landscape Escape No 2 as part of London’s 2005 Young Masters exhibition, this Suffolk artist clearly had something he was itching to say. His exhibit – a fully functioning flame-throwing tank made from lawn mower parts covered with reproduction Constable paintings – engendered numerous interpretations, one of which was that mankind should reflect more deeply on the way it treats its cultural and artistic heritage and by extension, the landscape.

It doesn’t require prompting from a two-stroke flame thrower to see that despite our penchant for filling the countryside with domestic refuse, images of the landscape continue to rate highly with the public. John Constable’s The Hay Wain is one of the nation’s most enduring images, regularly voted most popular painting.

Closer to home, where the flatness of the land and largeness of the sky inject artists with an abundance of adjectives as well as inspiration, landscapes continue to make up a sizeable part of what sells best in East Anglia’s galleries.

It is believed European landscape painting first developed as a genre as early as the 1500s when painters such as Germany’s Albrecht Altdorfer defied fashion by omitting mythological and historical figures from their compositions and instead directed the viewer’s focus to the landscape of the background. Some two and a half centuries later Suffolk portraitist Thomas Gainsborough seduced the public with his poetic English landscapes and was an inspiration for one of the county’s most beloved painters, John Constable.

Today, communities such as Southwold and Long Melford in Suffolk, and Holt and Burnham Market in North Norfolk, are celebrated for their artistic centres. All produce a stream of land- scape and seascape paintings; some aimed squarely at the tourist memorabilia market, but others accomplished, interpretive and often impressionistic.

Like Constable, these works are informed by a sense of place; when East Anglian artists speak of their environment, they inevitably speak of large skies, changeable seas, storms, rain, tilled earth and of a light which is unmistakably East Anglia.

Physical terrain, climate and weather have always played an important role in British art, and in the twenty-first century, when unspoilt land is increasingly under threat, nature continues to be a central factor defining the character of East Anglian paintings.

Jane Lewis
‘Our landscape is quite difficult to get hold of, it’s very subtle,’ says Jane Lewis, a landscape artist whose work was recently sought out by an American buyer for a private collection of British art in New York. A student of the fine arts from University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, she came to her home in Suffolk after working as a picture researcher in London. She exhibits regularly with the New English Art Club, Mall Galleries, in London, as well as with Folkes Miller Fine Arts in Long Melford where her paintings fetch up to ₤2500.

‘The landscape is very agricultural,’ she says, ‘so you have very simple shapes. Sometimes it’s only a line across the middle with sky above and land below and there’s very little else.’

Although she describes herself as a figurative painter, Jane’s style is in fact free and gestural, with the ‘constants’ of her landscape - footpaths, trees and bushes – represented by spaces, shapes and most importantly, key marks depicted by a bold use of lines.

Long Melford’s gallery owner Mo Folkes-Miller, who concentrates almost exclusively on contemporary landscape paintings, found herself instantly drawn to the marks in Jane’s work: ‘Her work thrilled me in lots of ways. The interpretation both of the scene and the paint application; the aesthetic quality; the painterly and often daring brush strokes; her knowledge of and continued experimentation in, the art of painting; and her sensitivity in depicting the atmosphere.’

Rachel Lockwood
In contrast to Jane, North Norfolk’s Rachel Lockwood’s landscape paintings are more figurative, although she imbues each piece with what she sees as the distinctive colours of Norfolk: yellows, ochres and reds. Whether her paintings are of the sea or the land, a range of these hot shades find their way into many of her compositions, leaving the viewer to contemplate the meaning of unsettled seas churning with dark red undercurrents or, equally, lavender underbellies on clouds squatting within an otherwise calm sky.

After graduating from Hornsey College of Art (now Midddlesex University), Rachel began her artistic career as a scientific illustrator with an international publishing company. There, the requisite attention to miniscule detail was a far cry from the intense, lively acrylic and oil paintings she creates today.

‘My colours always have a dark side and the light,’ she says. ‘Because of my illustration training, there’s a battle that goes on inside me all the time between detail and a passion to let go. Illustration is so contained, I'm constantly trying to escape from it.’

As a result, Rachel’s paintings are often a battle between the figurative and semi-abstract. Excited by those moments when events shake up the natural balance of the world around her, she reacts strongly to the emotions these moments evoke and seeks as much to capture those feelings as to be true to the literal landscape.

As a part-owner of Cley-next-the-sea’s Pinkfoot Gallery, Rachel has the added benefit of seeing first-hand what the contemporary Norfolk art buyer favours. 'We seem to have rather discerning customers in the gallery which keeps us nicely on our toes trying to push the boundaries in what we all do. Although we do get customers that like photographic detail, we feel that it can kill the energy in a picture and we and the majority of our customers tend to favour art that captures the essence of its subject instead.’

Abstract landscapes by gallery artists such as Matt Underwood and Meg Foster are successful too, she says, fulfilling Rachel’s desire as both artist and gallery owner to capture raw energy and to ‘push the boundary’.

Roo Sangster-Bullers
Cambridge University graduate Roo Sangster-Bullers’ lively landscapes have been selling from Doric Art in Holt for the last six years. An abstract painter, Roo’s paintings are not so much about what she sees as what she feels. Many of her works are conceived after long periods spent wandering through, or sitting in, the outdoors – she once spent a day and night wrapped in a blanket at the Castlerigg Stone Circle in Cumbria, simply observing the moods of the landscape before recording her experiences in a series of paintings.

Annoyed by the people who describe Norfolk as ‘flat’, she points out that the surface may indeed be flat, ‘but what might be underneath?’

And ‘underneath’ is what Roo’s work is all about. Her paintings have a distinctive demarcation between what is ‘above’, which is usually painted fairly realistically, and what lies below the earth. It’s not the tilled earth that captivates her, but the history, loves and lives of those who have passed over the same spot through the ages.

‘Everything I paint represents the emotions I envisaged as I walked across whatever piece of land I was on. I try to interpret those feelings, the history of it. Who has walked the same path? What love has happened? What battles have been fought? I try to keep horizontal lines through my paintings to represent the flatness everyone talks about, but in the flatness is a world of human emotion.’

Simon Carter
This contemporary approach may, at first glance, seem a far cry from John Constable and his idealised, figurative imagery the nation holds so dear. And yet, as Essex-based abstract painter Simon Carter discovered when he took up the gauntlet to produce an entire show based on Constable’s work, Constable’s approach to landscape painting was, for its time, unconventional.

This realisation came to Simon in 2002 when he first saw a glassy, polished 19th Century American landscape painting on exhibition in the Tate at the same time that Constable was on show elsewhere in the museum. ‘Everything [on the Constable painting] was visible on the surface; a mad, flapping, exultant wreck of a surface; moving, demented and energised,’ he writes in his introduction to Get Constable, his one-man show for the Town Hall Galleries in Ipswich in March 2008. ‘What was seen in [the American Sublime paintings] was the image. In Constable, what you got was painting; image and paint bound together.’

Exhibiting with galleries such as London’s Mall Galleries, Norwich’s Horace Blue, and Chappel Galleries in Chappel, Essex, Simon’s work too can be described as moving, demented and energised. He has a distinctive style concerned mostly with arriving at an image through paint; his finished abstracts often have little resemblance to the place that inspired him. He concentrates on what paint will, and will not, do; on marks, scrapings and accumulations. Having to produce an exhibition with Constable at its core inevitably impacted on this style.

‘I was conscious of the fact that because Constable was in the exhibition title, people had expectations,’ he says, ‘and I did worry sometimes that with the way I paint, when I start a painting it is quite close to the drawings of the mill, or beach, or marsh, but the further I go on with it, the less it has to do with the place and the more it has to do with paint.’

To avoid this, and to allow viewers to discover a way into his paintings, Simon retained shapes and objects that might be recognisable; a building, clouds, or familiar patterns. ‘A little hook,’ he says, ‘on which you can get into the painting.’

Having spent twelve months producing 34 paintings and hundreds of sketches, each influenced by Flatford Mill, Willy Lott’s House and country scenes now so familiar to us, Simon Carter has come to the conclusion that producing a recognisable Constable image is ‘not enough’.

In order to do Constable’s landscapes justice, he says, the images have to be infused with paint, energy and passion. The small images we find today on tea towels and reproduction prints simply do not do credit to Constable’s formidable painting techniques.

That Constable’s passion has left its mark on Simon is evident. He speaks of wanting to do more work on the Constable paintings; of needing to eliminate discrepancies in his own interpretations.

For Town Hall Galleries, too, Get Constable was a success.
‘Landscape painting has a longstanding association with East Anglia, often to the critical and economical detriment of other emergent forms,’ says Julia Devonshire, the Town Hall Galleries’ Arts Project Officer. ‘Simon’s work straddled both historic and contemporary worlds. Faithful to the conventions - sites and methods – of the (local) tradition, Carter’s work breathed fresh life into the genre through his application of vibrant colour, bold shapes and natural simplicity.’

As well as receiving positive anecdotal and written comment, Get Constable generated a number of sales. ‘Which was very encouraging considering Town Hall Galleries are not a commercial gallery,’ she adds.

For Julia, this was confirmation that local audiences are not afraid of contemporary interpretations of the traditional.

Whether Simon Carter will get a chance to develop his Constable paintings has yet to be seen. Since closing his exhibition in Ipswich, he has had another three exhibitions in Suffolk and Norfolk. Not surprisingly, one of them was dedicated to that other perennial favourite – Norfolk Landscapes.

Jane Lewis’s work can be viewed on www.janelewisart.co.uk;
Rachel Lockwood’s on www.pinkfootgallery.com; Roo Sangster-Bullers’on www.dragonhallgallery.com; and Simon Carter’s work is on www.simoncarterpaintings.co.uk.