Changing views

Environmental art is all the rage, but, for landscape painters, it was never out of fashion. Laura Gascoigne finds out why

- Laura Gascoigne

UNDER threat of climate change, contemporary artists are rediscovering Nature. Yet as meltingice sculptures grab the headlines, artists working in an older medium—paint —have gone on quietly responding to the landscapes that inspired Gainsborough, Constable, Turner and Cotman.

Not all of these artists meant to follow a traditional path. At Trent Polytechnic in the 1970s, David Tress had no intention of becoming a painter; he was far more interested in experimental media. However, on summer holidays in Wales, the Pembrokeshire landscape got under his skin. ‘At the end of the three years, I wasn’t convinced by what I’d been doing and had the scandalous thought: “I think I want to be a painter… possibly a landscape painter.”’ Since moving to Pembrokeshire 45 years ago, he has painted all over Britain (the landscapes in his new exhibition at Messum’s London range from Scottish lochs to prehistoric sites in Wiltshire), but the places that inspire him ‘are often places I know well: ordinary slabs of landscape where, just by chance, you happen to be when something happens—an event of light —that transforms something that 10 minutes later would be nothing particular’.

The New Year and a Lit Cloud, 2020 (Fig 6), records such an event in a spot Mr Tress passes all the time outside his local town of Haverfordwest. Although he carries a sketchbook to make outline drawings, the real action takes place in the studio. ‘When you’re sitting in front of something, you’re almost totally absorbed in putting down what’s there; in the studio, gut feeling, memory and imagination are poured into the painting.’