Nik Chinook

I was brought up in rural Worcestershire on the Malvern Hills and later moved to Devon and now to the Cotswolds. So, it’s unsurprising that the English landscape forms an important thread throughout my work. While I work in different genres, as I feel appropriate to whatever my main artistic concerns are at the time, Landscape is always the touchstone for painterly exploration.

Throughout my career I have worked in oils, watercolours, inks, the digital realm, and mixed-media, and all have instigated fresh approaches to my art. I spent several years working almost exclusively in black and white. Executed in inks and acrylic paint, these works evoked traditional Japanese and Chinese ink paintings with their calligraphic expression and style.

Often my landscapes form a setting for some character or situation to be played out within. However, if there is a common feature that also runs through my ‘pure’ landscape work it is theatricality; playing with extraordinary lighting, moods and exaggeration and influenced by some of the great artists of the Renaissance through to contemporary cinematography.

Landscape painting is a remarkable vehicle for paint, colour, and the human mind to synthesise emotional responses in a way not dissimilar to the power of music. Sometimes it can be ‘apparently’ simple as when it captures a particular place or time, but at other times it can, in its most abstracted form, evoke ideas and insights that would once have been called a ‘spiritual’ experience. And on a good day, it can be both!