Pamela Harrison

I am a contemporary painter placed within the English landscape tradition, where I find excitement and inspiration from the beauty and elemental nature of landscape: the earth, the sea, the sky. I am particularly drawn to open landscapes, moor land, valleys, salt marshes and tidal mudflats – quiet, remote places which evoke a sense of contemplation and solitude.

My paintings convey the interplay of my emotional response to things seen and experienced within landscape through the physical activity of painting, a form of internal dialogue of remembering, visualizing and interpreting. Photographs and drawings are used only to act as a transitional reminder of a sense of place as the paintings are developed to produce a distillation of light, atmosphere and mood.

The activity of painting is immensely important to me. I paint intuitively, building up surfaces initially with my hands working directly into the oil paint to create a suggestion of space and depth. Subsequent layers of transparent and opaque paint are poured and splattered onto the canvas, scrubbed back, re-worked, drawn and scored into, using palette knives and brushes to create marks and texture until the essence of landscape has emerged.

I enjoy working on a variety of scales from more intimate portrayals to larger expressive works and I frequently work on several canvasses at a time. I am influenced by the magnificent works by Turner but I also love the work of many other painters including Rothko, Jacob van Ruisdael, Edward Seago and Joan Eardley.