In this gallery‑talk style monologue, artist Kit Glaisyer explains the conceptual and technical foundations of his recent series of West Dorset landscape oil paintings. He argues that a single painting can only capture one fleeting aspect of nature’s complexity, and that focusing on such moments can produce profound work. Glaisyer describes several key pieces – a gentle blue evening on Egerton Hill, a two‑year‑long, multi‑glazed work on the Martian Vale, a January view of Egerton Hill, a monumental 7‑foot Lewiston Hill canvas painted on oil‑on‑flax, a dramatic 6‑foot Stormy Eggedon View, a sun‑ray moment over Eglin Hill, and a refined, stylised Marsh Vale scene. He details his wet‑in‑wet approach, extensive glazing, use of oil on flax for expressive brushwork, and the importance of timing, light, colour harmony and emotional resonance. Throughout, he links the landscape’s visual qualities to human emotions, describing the work as an authentic, passionate translation of nature’s moods into paint.
Chapters
I love to paint a whole series of works about a particular moment because you can never actually do justice to nature in paint. You can, you can create a wonderful painting, but nature is so complex and so nuanced that all you can really hope to capture is one aspect of that beauty. And if you can do that, I believe you can create something really profound. This painting is all about trying to capture a very fleeting moment of brilliance as the sun melts into a hill in the Martian Vale, and it's very intense to paint something like this. It's a wet-in-wet technique and you have to achieve incredible subtlety of tone and light, but when you do it, it is so satisfying. So this painting is a gentle blue evening on Egerton Hill, and this was early June, and it's just one of those moments that has inspired a whole series of paintings. And I think for me, it's a wonderful combination of subtle colors that really inspired me with this painting. And finally reached that place where it's just, ah, you can relax into the tranquility of the moment. This painting took me 2 years to make. Built up with many, many layers of glazing, trying to get the subtlety of the color and the interaction between all the colors, the mistiness, the warmth of the glow along the horizon. Everything is just balanced perfectly in terms of tone and color and touch. And it's just about getting the nuance of the surface just perfect. So this next painting is a January view from Egerton Hill, and there's something I really love about the, the dark shadow contrasting with the glowing sun above the sea, and I also really love the textures of Egerton Hill and the ancient earthworks, which again are glowing with this warmer terracotta color. So this is one of my largest paintings in the exhibition. It's a 7-foot painting of Lewiston Hill, which is a hill that I return to often. I've been painting it now for around 15 years. And this particular view is one of my favorites. It's quite a dramatic painting, quite loosely, boldly painted, and it's also oil on flax, so the flax really allows the brushwork to be more evident. It's a very magical place, Lewiston Hill. It's— I always say it's where all the fairies and goblins live. It's just incredible, and I'm just always returning to it and feeling so inspired. So this is a very different painting. This is one of my Stormy Eggedon Views. It's a 6-foot painting, and I've worked with my Stormy series on a number of different scales, and they really have a sense of the drama that we experience in West Dorset. And what's wonderful about this place is that I can stand on the hill and I can see a storm forming on the distant Devon border, and I know it's then going to come and cross the valley right on top of me and then pass over. And so I have this whole sequence of paintings I can create from this experience. And then once the storm passes, it will all return to the quieter, softer, natural colors of the fields. So this painting is one of my most recent finished paintings, and it's one that I've been working on for several months now. And it's sun rays above Eglin Hill, and it's a particular moment, one that I'll— I'm waiting for all the time. I'm waiting for these moments to happen, and then I have to be ready for them. I have to be just in the right place at the right time, and I just love it when all the elements were in place, and then I waited. Until I felt ready to do the final expression of this moment, because I knew that I only had one opportunity to do it, and if I got it wrong, I'd have to repaint the, the middle distance and then do it again. So it's a very satisfying painting for me. So this is a far higher painting than the other ones in here. It's really got the emphasis on the sky and the drama of emerging light from behind clouds, which is probably one of my favorite motifs. And again, it's a view over the Martian Vale, but now the landscape is quite compressed at the bottom of the painting. And there's not a lot of distraction in the landscape. The colours are lovely, I think, these burgundies and the pinks and the greens, but the emphasis is very much on the expressive brushwork of the sky and the clouds and the light. And this is why I love oil paint. It is so expressive and so versatile. Again, it's very much a painting about a moment that nature gives us. So this is another one of my Lewiston Hill paintings in the north side of the Marsh Vale in West Dorset, and it's quite different to a lot of the other paintings in this exhibition because it's more of a refined painting. It's slightly more stylized in some of my pieces, and it's got a slight, slightly magical quality to it that I've really indulged in. Again, the composition is very much an overall composition, the painting, where everything fits like a, a well-fitting jigsaw, but at the same time, there is a sense of fidelity to nature and to color and to all the nuances of subtleties. So I believe in many ways nature reflects our emotions, and that's what I can only express in paint. And this is very much an experience that I know I can share with other people in a very authentic and passionate and honest and emotionally expressive manner.
