Tower and Town, August 2024 (view the full edition)Wiltshire LandscapesBased in rural North Wiltshire in the small hamlet of Bushton, I paint the surrounding landscape from my studio overlooking farmland a stone's throw from the Ridgeway and the ancient North Wessex Chalk Downs. Like many artists I have met, I was not encouraged to paint at school; the art room was a rather intimidating space dominated by a strict teacher who definitely had his favourites. However, I continued to draw and paint in my own time. The technique wasn't particularly good but I really enjoyed doing it and that is, after all, what's important. I was brought up in West London and started my career with Channel 4 in 1981. I became Picture Editor there in the late '80s which helped develop my compositional skills and a sense of colour and place. I studied at Heatherley School of Fine Art and the London Drawing School. A frequent visitor to the area for the last 26 years I moved full time to Wiltshire over 10 years ago. My work reflects a close familiarity with the landscape and the shifting light, informed by many miles of walking and revisiting favourite sites: hill forts, sarsen stones and the ubiquitous white horse figures. I volunteered with Swindon Museum and Art Gallery cataloguing axe heads and flints and that further sparked my interest in looking at the landscape in a rather different way - what lies beneath, the people who lived around the Ridgeway and connecting the urban with the wilds of the downs just on our doorstep. The materials and process of making are integral to my practice. I sketch first en plein air. The sketches are then worked up to larger scale charcoal drawings in the studio. Using an intense colour palette I build layers of highly saturated oil paint on primed linen. My compositions are often partially abstracted and playful. Superficially the simple graphic shapes mask a complex process of composition, balance and response to my subject. Colours give the impression of vibrating across the picture plane. The soft contours and folds of the hillsides ripple and echo to form pleasing but sometimes unlikely patterns, clumps of trees sit against vast skies and there is a sense of those who used this land in past times; farmers, travellers, shamans, druids, seekers and the traces they left behind. I recently had a successful solo show Distant Echoes in Malmsbury. I sell and exhibit locally through galleries and Open Studios as well as undertaking commissions for private clients.  Hackpen White Horse (March 2022) Simone Dawood Simone Dawood |