The gift that keeps on giving

Plein air painting offers me a different way of working. Rather than turning inward towards memory or the unconscious, I become present to what is immediately around me: light, heat, colour, distance, weather, the shape of land and the particular character of a place.

I paint outside particularly when I am in Greece, where the intensity of the light and the physicality of the landscape seem to demand attention. Olive trees, mountains, dry grasses, stone, sea and shifting shadows become ways of locating myself. I am not trying simply to describe a view, but to experience what happens when I stay with it long enough to really look.

There is something grounding in this. My attention moves outwards into the world. I notice where I am sitting, the temperature of the air, sounds arriving and disappearing, the movement of leaves, insects, birds, people passing. Painting becomes an embodied practice of being somewhere rather than thinking about somewhere.

In Greece especially, this experience carries a sense of rootedness and safety. Returning to familiar landscapes and painting them allows me to establish a relationship with place through sustained attention. I do not have to search for an image; the world is already there.

The paintings become records of these periods of presence. They hold not only what I saw, but something of what it felt like to be physically located within the landscape — to sit still, to look, and for a while simply to belong to the place I am in.