Escape to the Black Mountains

By Abigail Waddell 
 
Original artwork
Oil on canvas
Framed
Image size:  H:100cm x W: 100cm
Framed size:  H: 104cm x W: 104cm
 
Abigail is a South Cotswold landscape painter who draws on seasoned techniques from painters of the past and translates them into contemporary, impressionistic form, often including just enough of the land or sea to suggest scale, orientation, weather conditions and distance.
 
In this powerful vista, we have a view across to the Black Mountains, a group of hills spread across parts of Powys and Monmouthshire in south-east Wales and extending across the England–Wales border. Our eye is drawn to the solitary, white building nestling in the middle of the sweeping valleys.
 
Abigail is expert at conveying moving skies and light scudding across the land beneath, casting shadows and pools of sun, and she is equally adept at capturing dramatic, stormy weather, billowing summer clouds or gentle sunsets.
 
Her creative obsession with low horizons and big skies, with dramatic billowing and scudding cloud formations, reminds us of the work of Jacob van Ruisdael, in the Dutch Golden Age, and of Constable, who always venerated what Ruisdael had achieved, in this regard, before him.
 
In scale, her work ranges between the six-feet canvasses of Constable and the small, intimate landscapes of Ruisdael. Her locations are mainly the South Cotswolds and the Cornish and Scottish coastlands, but she has also produced a range of urban (typically Cheltenham) and ornamental garden views on a smaller scale.