Chasing Light - Spring shadows, grey skies, and why light is my everything

I have spent 25 years as an artist, and in all that time I have never once been able to make a painting that excited me without two things: light and shadow. Without them, the canvas stays blank, the brush stays dry. They are not simply subjects I return to — they are the reason I paint at all. This makes living in the Pennines a complicated business

For months at a stretch, the hills here are wrapped in grey. Not the dramatic grey of a Turner watercolour — but a flat, heavy, unrelenting grey that sits on the landscape and refuses to move. There is no drama in it, no shadow play, no edge of light catching a wall or a rooftop. For someone whose whole practice depends on those things, it can feel genuinely oppressive. I will be honest: there are winters where I find it hard to work at all

Running in the opposite direction

My colour palette has often been described as hyper-real — more vivid, more saturated, more luminous than life as it actually appears. That isn’t an accident. It is a response. When the world outside is grey and muted, I find myself running in the opposite direction, creating a different reality on canvas. The paintings become a kind of refusal — a place I can go where the light always comes through

A landscape that works against you creatively is a strange thing to live inside. You love the place, its wildness and its character, but you also spend months waiting for it to give you something to work with. The creative restlessness that builds up over a long grey winter is considerable. And then, suddenly, spring arrives.

The false spring

A couple of weeks ago we had what can be described as a false spring — a few days of clear, cold, extraordinary light before the clouds returned. I was out immediately. That particular quality of early spring light is unlike anything else in the year: crisp and low, casting long shadows that move slowly and deliberately across whatever they touch. Trees become painters themselves, throwing shifting canvases of branch and leaf across walls, pavements, and rooftops.

I came home with my head full of images and my camera full of reference photographs. The excitement I feel at moments like these is difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced the contrast of a long oppresive winter followed by that first real light. The relief and joy we feel all at once is overwhelming

How I work from light

Much of what I gathered during that false spring is now being worked into new paintings in the studio. My recent woodland series has grown directly from this process — paintings that aim to be dream-like in colour, immersive in scale, as if you could step between the trees and walk among them. They are not literal representations of what I saw. They are what the light felt like.

If you’re curious about how these paintings begin, I’ve recently shared a time-lapse of my large-scale work ‘Trees by the Park’ on social media which shows the full process from the first mark to the last. I always start with a loose sketch in acrylics — a rough map of the composition — and then build up layer after layer of highly pigmented colour in soft, translucent layers. The aim is always that ethereal glow: the sense that the light is coming from inside the painting rather than falling on it from outside.

Hoping for more

I hope you have been able to get outside and enjoy the first signs of spring, wherever you are. After a long winter, there is something quietly extraordinary about that first warm afternoon, that first long shadow stretching across the pavement, that first moment where the light actually means something again.
Here’s hoping there are plenty more crisp spring days to come. 

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If this post has resonated with you, I’d love you to take a look at my new open edition print collection — a way to bring light into your own home, at an accessible price point. Every print is made to a high standard, dropshipped by The Printspace London. You can find the full collection via the link