Seeing A Familiar Landscape Through Different Eyes

When one of the favourite places to pursue your art is amongst the most filmed, photographed, drawn, painted and written about in the UK, it takes a special talent to create images that bring a different dimension to such a familiar location.

Artist Paul Talbot-Greaves achieves this seemingly impossible task by switching his focus from obvious picturesque qualities in a scene to the more subtle intricacies of how sunlight, shadows, shapes and angles interact to inspire works of shimmering beauty.

Those qualities are dazzlingly brought to life in his latest exhibition, ‘Sunlight and Shadows: The Yorkshire Dales,’ a collection of 27 new works created over the last year and which opens at Harrogate’s Watermark Gallery on May 10.

Paul, who lives near Huddersfield in the southern Pennines, has been a professional painter for 26 years and two years ago was elected as a member of the prestigious Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours. His works are held in private collections around the UK as well as in other countries including, the USA, Canada and Australia. He is also the author of four published art books.

I don’t go deliberately looking for pretty pictures to paint. Instead, I look at scenes from a design point of view, the shape of a field, the angle of a building, the patterns that sunshine and shadows draw among the trees in a wood. Interpreting how these different elements interact means I can bring something new and fresh to even the most familiar of places and, hopefully, help the viewer to see beyond the obvious. Paul Talbot-Greaves

A keen walker, he spends most of his time outside between November and March when, he says, the lower light levels have ‘an almost Provencal quality.’ He carries a camera and sketchbook on his walks to immediately capture the aspects that catch his eye and then will spend much of the rest of year painting in the studio.

A lot of my work features sights and locations in the Dales but because of the different way I see things, I always find novelty and enjoyment every time I visit and, hopefully, that comes through in my painting.

Liz Hawkes, owner of Watermark Gallery, says:

“Paul is a remarkably talented and hugely popular artist who possesses a rare ability to make us see even the most familiar of scenes and locations with a fresh eye. We are delighted to stage his latest exhibition which, I am sure, will prove highly successful.”