Alex Edwards

“There is no end to the landscape or to the colour of the days. The imagination goes through them.” Christopher Neve, Unquiet Landscape. 

Alex’s work reflects a love of the natural world that began in childhood. This has been a constant in his life, connecting his work as an artist with a career in Africa as a guide and bush pilot in remote western Tanzania.

Now based in Dorset he is compelled by the same affinity for nature and spends much of his time exploring the chalk downland that defines the area. “To me this landscape, run through with ancient holloways, feels archetypal. Surrounded by red kites and buzzards and exposed to the elements, it’s timeless. Nature is palpable here.”

His plein air paintings are unpremeditated reactions to this landscape. He sets out to be instinctive, using painting as a way of exploring the structure and energy of the place. The best results involve a certain recklessness that allows the paint to speak as clearly as the painting.

Alex’s studio works and monotypes are the opposite of his plein air studies; based on memories or drawings made in the field, they’re an amalgam of an idea and a place; echoes of what it felt like to be in a wild landscape.