Other contemporary artists that I really like , or who have influenced my work:

Iain Biggs- contemporary British artist and scholar Iain Biggs is a local (Bristol) scholar, and artist, with whom I share an interest in narratives; in the mapping of spectral traces in the landscapes; and in the ecologies of space and place in relation to people and non-humans alike. Iain’s practice as a painter includes elements of cartography; of writing and of photography. He has been a foundational member of many scholarly grouping, linking practicing artists with research conducted in the academy.

Rebecca Crowell- American contemporary painter My interest in Crowell’s work is in her contemporary uses of oils and waxes (ancient materials). She makes minimalist contemporary abstract landscape-informed paintings. Rebecca Crowell is the acknowledged modern ‘mistress’ of contemporary work with oil and cold wax: (wax, oil and pigment being the oldest recorded form of painting medium) - these are the media I have taken up since my desire for sustainability drew me away from exclusively bright modernist acrylic colours.

Jade-fadojutimi - British contemporary painter. Jade paints in mixed media on huge canvases and combiners figurative and abstract images. Her work is very influenced by landscape and flora and includes the use of intense colour. She is a young London-based .artist who exhibits regularly in London galleries. I like that she describes herself as a painter, and is interested in the practice of painting, and also writing about that practice.

Howard Hodgkin-British /painter (1932-2017) I have been in love with Howard Hodgkin’s paintings and prints since I first came across one of his paintings, as a teenager, on the cover of a book of Susan Sontag’s short stories in a second hand bookshop in Petersfield, in the 1960s. He does not describe himself as an abstract painter, but rather, says that his paintings are ‘representational of emotion’. I love his love of colour and the obvious delight in the physicality and materiality of paint that is apparent in his brush strokes.

Fred Ingrams- Contemporary British painter from Norfolk, is obsessed with the fens and the flow country - his local landscapes.There is a a glorious and almost neon sense of colour to his abstract (ish) landscapes.

Albert Irvin-British abstract expressionist (1922-2015) Albert Irvin’s prints are gloriously colourful and playful. I have one on my living room wall. His use and juxtaposition of multiple colours in his later, larger paintings is mesmerising. He was inspired by the American abstract expressionists, when they exhibited in the UK in the 1950s, but I think he knocks most of them ‘into a cocked hat’.

Erin Lawlor- contemporary British painter Erin Lawlor’s work moves across the surfaces of her canvases (she works wet on wet in oil paint) as if the paint is dancing. Her colours, (informed by a background in European art history), evoke the old masters, and her brush strokes (similarly to Hodgkin and Ansell, above) evoke movement and are almost performative in quality and texture. In my own work I move cold wax and oil paint around surfaces with a series of squeegees, rather than with a huge brush, but the sense of life and movement that Lawlor’s work radiates is the kind of movement and liveliness that I too, seek to evoke.

Barbara Rae -Scottish contemporary abstract painter. Barbara Rae’s prints and paintings (she segues between the two with equanimity) are vibrantly and sharply and synthetically colourful. She refuses the term ‘landscape’ to describe her work, but , nonetheless, her work is informed by her environments, whether those of her native Scotland; Spain or, recently, the arctic.

Megan Rooney. A British-Canadian contemporary painter. She works in layers, applying paint with brushes and then sanding back surface layers with an electric grinder. She can work for months on groups of paintings that she describes as ‘families’. She paints with oils, oil sticks and pastels and often names her work after colours. Her 2024 London exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac, for instance was called ‘yellow, yellow, blue’.

Anna Somerville- Scottish contemporary painter Anna Somerville’s landscapes are fresh, vibrant and colourful , contemporary depictions: particularly her ‘neonscapes’. She is represented by the & gallery, a small gallery on Dundas street which is a favourite Edinburgh haunt of mine. I particularly like the ‘splashy’ fluidity of her work, which has definitely influenced my ‘scapes’.

Zoe Taylor: a contemporary British landscape painter whose work does not follow the landscapes she immerses herself in too literally. I love her use of light and organic colour. She uses all her materials, including the raw substrates, as surfaces within her paintings. She mixes inks and paints, as do I.

Flora Tukhnovic: A British contemporary painter whose work is heavily influenced in both form and colour by French rococco painters. I love the flow and freedom of her work and although I find her rococco mentors completely over the top, I love this artist’s use of colour.

Richard Whadcock - contemporary British painter. Richard Whadcock is the only painter I have actually found on instagram, as opposed to have come across elsewhere in the world, and then followed up their instagram feed. His landscapes instil a kind of ethereal silence in me - they are informed by the Sussex downlands where I spent my childhood, but the downs are viewed indirectly; through a mist; veiled; as if from a distance.