The motif of Landscape has been a major part of Mark Godwin’s work for over 30 years, and he has been greatly influenced by the 18th century Romantic notion of the Sublime, and our longing for an emotional encounter with nature.

These paintings are about finding a visual equivalent for his sensation before nature. They are paintings about the poetic idea of landscape. There is a nostalgia, and timelessness about his work, and a conscious blurring of the boundaries between abstraction, and representation. They are landscape of the imagination. They are paintings about feelings.

Godwin is very much a studio based artist, and has an intuitive approach to painting, with its trials and errors, and its visible signs of the ensuing journey. Brushstrokes made, corrections following corrections, consciously allowing the qualities of paint to override the logic of representation, all evolving into something familiar, yet not quite. These works are about perceptual incidents and not definite events.

The paintings in this exhibition mark the borderlines between representation and abstraction, and between the two realities of paint, firstly it’s illusionistic quality, and then it’s physical materiality.

Godwin has used this intermingling of abstraction and representation to best convey a memory, or a collective memory, of landscape. These paintings resonate.