I am partly here because I visited St Ives from the Midlands as a teenager. My studio is in St Ives, on Porthmeor beach, where Ben Nicholson had a studio. I think Literature taught me a way of reading visually which is very concise, and also taught me how culture is layered. At Oxford the Literature course really embraces the cannon – I’ve read ‘Paradise Lost’ as well as Blake Miltonic grandeur and Romanticism stays with me. My sense of Englishness is very influenced by reading from Anglo Saxon through to the present day. My first degree was in English Literature at Oxford. I am delighted to be included, with a work that is unusual for me, because it really focuses on landscape by which I mean an art-historical sense of the land as a vista, and looked at through the lens of a painterly tradition that extends back to works like ‘Mr and Mrs Andrews’ by Gainsborough. English counties are all very different, yet Sussex, maybe because it faces France and Europe, seems quintessentially English to me. I loved my visit to see the exhibition – it surveys a significant reach of time, focussing on the Sussex landscape, but in doing so it speaks of England and of attempts that English artists have made to describe the English landscape. How does it feel to be included in this exhibition?
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