Changing light across dartmoor

Here the change from light to shade, and the kaleidoscopic colours that result across the hills on Dartmoor in typical English weather. I loved painting the blues and deep violets against the ochres and umbers in the shadows. I love colour! That’s why I love painting. This is all painted in a looser style than my pointillist paintings, and I feel more comfortable painting in this way. Its faster, in the sense that I can record my feelings more directly. I sometimes spoke to the landscapes I painted. Sitting in a landscape and thinking about how to render it in paint is a very intimate experience, like meeting a person. Eastern philosophy teaches that we are one with the earth and the stars and our life contains the vastness of space. Spending hours in a landscape painting is like spending hours with a person, talking, laughing. I still feel empathy towards a landscape like I can people, and landscapes or places can become friends who share suffering and joy. Landscapes are not dead things and everything is alive, part of the rhythm of compassion in the universe.