“In February 2023 Andrew Gifford travelled to the US, painting in Colorado, Chicago and on the coast of Northern Maine. The conditions were difficult, with snow in every state and daytime temperatures dipping below minus sixteen. The twenty detailed outdoor studies he returned with became the starting point for four large canvases of snowy woodland on which he worked for the rest of 2023.
Last spring Gifford had also started to paint outside at the Waterhall Wilding restoration project, the site of a former golf-course on the South Downs. The small panel studies he made at Waterhall were later developed into three large-scale canvases and describe the delicate play of sunlight on nettles, moss, and bark, deep within the canopy of a hawthorn copse. The bright colours of the Waterhall paintings are in marked contrast to his concluding series which began in December, three remarkable, brooding paintings of the winter sunrise cutting through the frost-laden tangle of bramble hedges and scrubland at Barcombe Mills in Sussex.
The thread linking all these paintings together is Gifford’s fascination and love for those landscapes which create wildlife-rich habitats. The brambles, thorns, and rough, unkempt woodland, invariably ignored by landscape painters, has now become the chief preoccupation of his work. Underpinned by a deep knowledge of the natural world, Gifford’s paintings set out to show the beauty of these vital, scruffy elements of a healthy, thriving environment and in doing so, may help to change perceptions of what makes the sort of countryside we want to live in and which our wildlife so urgently needs” — John Martin Gallery
Image: Andrew Gifford with ‘Waterhall series’, photograph by Freddie Bell, courtesy of John Martin Gallery.
