Project write up
The Devon Farmers project followed my Dartmoor landscape series and was initially going to be a way to return to figure painting, but placing the subjects within the rural landscape. That was the original idea. Maintaining the landscape work I had developed during the Dartmoor project, but incorporating the human interest. However once started, like many ideas it became something else.


This was partly due to another idea I had wanted to pursue for a while, which was to do a series of pieces combining artwork with text. Reflective of my illustration background and also particularly influenced by the work of some of the “Golden Age” American illustrators, whose work adorned the covers of magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s in the early 20th century. The artwork for these was nearly always figure based with often little or no background or landscape at all.


The decision to drop the landscape element was partly the above but also came about once I had started to meet and photograph the farmers themselves. They became the main interest (they and the occasional farm animal) and the background environment surplus to requirement. So came about the images of the Devon Farmers project