Austrian/Italian Landscape

These are an on-going series of paintings from the past five years.

The woodland works, are from the Wienerwald, on the edge of the city of Vienna.

They are all made using drawings and small studies.

The Italian works, are part of on-going work in Anticoli Corrado, Lazio.

All these paintings are on the square, or double square format

Up until about ten years ago I had made ‘landscape’ paintings in the conventional format of the rectangular shape, reading the canvas, left to right. See Archive.

The fact a canvas is read left to right made me consider how I wanted these ‘landscape’ paintings to be read.

Although my paintings are a depiction of reality, and remain rooted in figuration, they begin life as purely abstract, conceptual ideas.

As I make I a painting I want these abstract ideas to remain, and translate themselves on to the canvas.

I feel with the square format there is no distraction to this. The viewer is immediately in the painting.

How the viewer perceives, and reads the painting is integral to my work. With a square format I have a structure to what I am making.

Within these new paintings, I have consciously set out to have a structure, scale and format.