As someone said on Twitter the other day, as a freelancer you are your brand. Wise words.
We like to feel familiar with brands, sure we can trust and rely on them. Expressing familiarity and humanity is a good way to encourage trust and credibility. So here’s an insight into some of the creative stuff I do outside work – landscape paintings. As you can see I’m a real person who does real things in a real place. Not someone mysterious and enigmatic who might disappear off the face of the planet or rip you off!
Here are my five best landscape paintings, those where I’ve captured exactly what I wanted in exactly the way I wanted to represent them. It’s profoundly satisfying, just like writing a piece of copy I know is really good. It’s easy to get hooked on the feeling – just one reason I love my work so much.
Copywriting is half creative, half logic. I find painting is much the same: logic drives the basic structure and composition of the picture, creativity kicks in when brush meets canvas.
5 landscape paintings – Acrylics on canvas
- Looking towards the sea from a windy ridge north of Woodingdean, running south of and parallel to the South Downs Way. I like the shadows of the trees at the bottom of the valley. The way they’re dramatically cast by the low winter sun makes the view so much more interesting at this time of year
- Fremlington Edge, North Yorkshire. Bleak dings my bell, which explains my long aesthetic affair with the South Downs. Round our way they’re achingly bleak. I feel the same way about Swaledale, where my folks live, a place of endless skies and windy silence only punctuated by calling sheep and burbling skylarks
- Striding Edge on Helvellyn, Cumbria. I spent along time creating background texture for this one, on a mission to represent the spectacularly high, brutally rugged and deeply shadowed landscape I love so much
- Tilberthwaite Gyhll, Cumbria. This one comes with poignant memories of thrilling, muddy, freezing scrambles up the mountain via a steep, fern-scented valley worn v-shaped into the hillside by the fast-running, frothy beck
- The view north from the Falmer Road just north of Brighton, looking towards Lewes. For the past two summers the fields up there have been an absolute riot of poppies. Combined with the deep late summer green of the copses and smooth, serried, sun-scorched crops, it was an irresistible subject
