This week I have been working on a commission and a smaller landscape as well as trying to finish a Whitby painting. The commission and smaller painting are both inspired by the moors.
I was thinking about what draws me to these places; the open spaces, the moody skies and the warm colours of plants and heather. It isn't a chocolate box landscape, it is something wilder. There is a freedom in painting them.
Whilst I have been painting I have been watching "Pretend it's a City" (yes, I paint mainly with music but sometimes with the telly on, maybe it is bad practise-I don't know!). Anyway you couldn't get further from the moors as it is a Martin Scorsese series about Fran Lebowitz, predominantly about New York; its culture, people and changes. It felt so refreshing to watch something with an older, quick witted interesting woman as the focus.
Lebowitz describes New York as being the hardest city to live in and therefore she feels she is brave to even do it. It of course has its pay off with art, architecture and stories . Maybe there is a distant link to that and the moors; they are harder landscapes to navigate (hills and weather!) but when we are brave enough to explore them we are rewarded with the skies waiting to be painted, the abandoned architecture of ruins and the stories they tell.
