The landscapes I paint are mostly from photographs I took during my career as an interior designer. As I travelled about the country (and other countries) I spent my weekends looking for likely looking scenes to paint and then went home and painted them. Of course I couldn’t paint them all so there are lots still to do.
Since interior designers are heavily dependant upon their skills of conceptualization, rendering those concepts and subsequently building them, art created by designers tends to be accurate, detailed and often entirely imaginary. In fact all design projects start off as a figment of someone’s imagination and that’s what makes our urban landscapes so interesting.
Rural and wild landscapes tend to be recordings of what is there and what is being lost to development. As a designer of retail stores I had plenty of internal conflicts due to this paradox. To make matters worse, my design environment was usually shopping malls which were often built on important wetlands. Since wetlands of any description are the equivalent of supermarkets for human beings, it isn’t hard to understand the devastating effects shopping malls in particular have had on wildlife populations all over the world.
Consequently, many of my landscapes and wildlife paintings carry a fairly blunt message that doesn’t leave much to the imagination in terms of the effect our species has had on the planet.
Of course not all of my paintings are so hard hitting because I enjoy beautiful landscapes and spend a lot of my free time searching for the visual combinations that intrigue me most.
My paintings are usually loaded with detail and depict scenes and animals that often go unnoticed. I don’t paint “cute” scenes. Generally, I’m looking for rugged scenes that will tell you a tale if you look for it. Most of my paintings are part of some sort of adventure and therefore mean a lot to me. So they are hard to part with. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did creating them.
John Newell