Daniel Chatto is primarily a painter of landscape. An apostle of unspoilt nature, he favours “the wild, the wind blasted and the epic”. His favourite stamping grounds have been the Western Isles of Islay, Harris, Mull and Iona, the Gower Peninsula and the Preseli Mountains of Pembrokeshire. The part of Sussex he now lives in has a timeless, ancient gravitas that is a feature of all these places. The paintings in this exhibition celebrate the austere beauty of the South Downs. In this series of paintings, Chatto conveys a vision of the spirituality and redemptive power of nature. In ‘Landscape With Oaks’ he marvels at the huge breadth of the trees canopy. “They have adapted to the high winds on the Downs by growing outwards rather than upwards. Though in a way they are stunted, they are powerful and splendid for all that”. ‘Entwined’ expresses this reverence for the forces of life and growth. The work features an oak and holly tree that have sprouted from the same spot yet have continued to forge upward and thrive. The dynamic urgency and strength of line in this drawing portray so effectively that irrepressible force of growth. ‘Storm Caught in Branches’ celebrates the resilience of a dying tree encompassed in the foliage of one in its prime. The mood is philosophical, optimistic yet accepting of imposed hardship.

Achieving a pure, unadulterated natural colour is a preoccupation for Chatto in these sensitive paintings. Cennino Cennini’s ‘Il Libro Dell’Arte’ (The Craftsman’s Handbook) has been his painterly bible from early in his career. “It was really the first manual of painting which told us how to prepare pigment and how to paint with it.” Chatto doesn’t buy paint, he makes it himself with pigment, which gives him a much greater range of colour and much greater control over the painting process. “I love the idea of taking something which is dug straight out of the earth to paint the landscape. I mix the powdered pigment as I go along which can be difficult when it’s very windy as a great deal of my work is now done outside! It’s applied with various solutions of different glues, gums, egg white, egg yolk, oils and various waxes. Texture can be added by incorporating particles such as chalk, marble dust or even traces of mother of pearl from the inside of my oyster shell palettes.”

In fact there are moments during a visit to Chatto’s workplace when you feel as if you’ve entered an apothecary’s laboratory. On surfaces around the house sit mysterious unlabelled jars containing viscous fluids and a pestle and mortar containing a frothy, nonculinary concoction. From a sturdy wicker fishing basket - his portable work box which doubles up as a stool when painting en plein air - appear intriguing bags filled with fine particles of pure iridescent colour. These are marked with the evocative, dog-eared labels of renowned European pigment suppliers - Kremer, Sennelier, Zecchi and Cornelissen. Oyster shells stained with cobalt blue and terre verte, a jumble of brushes, smattered rags, boxes of rubbly lumps of ochre-hued rock and chalky flints of saffron yellow are subsequently disgorged throughout the morning.

The khadi paper on which all the paintings in this exhibition are presented also has special ingredients. Produced in south India, it is made of pulped cotton rags following a centuries old tradition. “It’s as thick and tough as tree bark which gives it a wonderful elemental quality. The outsize sheets used for ‘Storm Blasted Oak’, ‘Landscape with Oaks’ and ‘Transformation’ are hand made in enormous moulds in which the wet pulp is sloshed around and strained by the labours of 4 or 5 paper workers.” The paper’s strength allows Chatto to work flat on the ground, weighting the corners down with stones. In ‘Storm Washed Study’ and ‘Spate’ a downpour washed away much of his brushwork, creating the work without destroying the paper.

If sanguine is a favoured Chatto medium, with its lineage linking him back to the golden age of Renaissance drawing, then so is oak gall ink, the main medium used for writing from the Middle Ages and beyond. “You boil up the oak galls which make a beautiful golden solution, then drop in a rusty nail which turns it browner and browner, then purple and finally black. I’ve used it on the tree trunk in ‘A Green Thought in a Green Shade’ which started life as a drawing.”

The painting ‘Origin’ also uses oak gall ink combined with silverpoint, another technique which emerged in the early Renaissance. “Silverpoint is often associated with fine, precise, line but I bought a fat stick of silver from Hatton Garden and have used it very freely here.” The silver adds a delicate, other-worldly quality to the beautifully drafted female figure who appears to be floating through an ethereal atmosphere. Indigo, an ancient vegetable dye, is used to great effect for the blue-black background of ‘Transformation’. Its dense dark hue suggests the recumbent figure is suspended in either a fathoms deep aqueous bed or perhaps the inky regions of outer space. Particles of lime subsequently washed on the surface here and there deposit crystals to create an effect of watery phosphorescence or the illusion of the constellations of the galaxy.

What we observe in this show is a new interest and accomplishment in Chatto’s study of the human figure. A transcendental quality as well as a deep maturity has developed in his recent figuration.

Since his last exhibition in 2007, the work has also increased in scale dramatically. “Years ago I worked with large dimensions when I learnt fresco painting with Faith Vincent. Working on something bigger allows me to enter into the painting, to walk around inside it and to worry less about issues like space and recession.” Discovering the huge pieces of khadi paper has enabled Chatto to create large works outside without the encumbrance of an easel and this too has brought a further sense of ease and freedom. “I either sling a rope around a tree and clip the paper to it, or pin it down on the ground so that I can walk around it.”

It was a peerless autumn day when I visited Chatto on the Sussex Downs. Dumped on the floor beside the wicker painting hamper sits a cavernous wartime ‘tank’ coat from 1943, of weighty canvas outer, thickly lined with sheepskin - this dedicated land artist’s solution to facing the elements at the onset of winter.

Fiona Macleod, 2014