When you stop walking and pause to look at the countryside around you it is difficult to find one particular section of the view that typifies the whole. On the Ridgeway it is the sweep of eyes across the distance that excites and astonishes. It is the physical need to move the eyes across the terrain and the sky rather than concentrating on one area that gives the thrill.

The painters problem is how to capture that experience in a picture. So often the visual interest, the elements of pattern and contrast lie in the distance and not in the immediate foreground and it is difficult to find a solution to accommodate this fact. Painters in the past have often cast a strong shadow across their foregrounds forcing the viewer to ignore it and concentrate on the view from the middle ground.

Another solution is to confine the picture to a close-up of the distance where the pattern and colour is strong enough to give a strong structure to the painting. It is as if one was studying the distance through binoculars. The result is to put the viewer in mid air as though in a low flying hot air balloon. You seem magically transported straight to the area of interest. At the same time your eye for detail and contrasts are heightened by the very fact you can concentrate your understanding of how this distant landscape works because there is no need to explain the space between where you are standing and where your eyes are looking. It is an uneasy experience. 

Choosing a section of the view that can infer the thrills of the panorama is difficult. The ideal picture should, I believe, send the viewer’s eye sweeping across the picture surface in a way that mirrors, on a small scale, the real life pleasure of sweeping the eye across a vast landscape. This is best done by painting a large picture that actually forces the viewer to physically turn both eyes and head to take it in. Overlapping pairs of pictures add an extra obstacle to easy access. They force each half to be scrutinised in turn before appreciating they also both work together as a whole.

In these cases I try to give the viewer a solid foreground for them to feel safe to stand on when they look into the distance. The foreground becomes a jumping off point for the leap into the depths of the view. I need give it only enough interest to give the viewer courage and security before their eye journeys along the visual pathways of paint sweeping into the distance. Your eyes are invited by the paint to walk the space across the fields, sometimes to take shortcuts through gaps in the hedges or to leap from one patch of colour to another to and fro over the whole picture. It is an energetic exercise that seems to bring with it a satisfying sensation of the passing of time such as is to be found in perusing a Chinese landscape scroll.

Nick Schlee. 2010