Tracking the Luminous Wild

“For me, translating the vastness and shifting light of this terrain isn’t a matter of sight, but of weight: the emotional anchor that gives a canvas its breath.”

Preseli Artist, Aston Colley

To those who trace the old ways and seek the quiet places,

My art is a slow-yielding thing, bound to the high, wind-scoured sanctuary I call home: a stone chapel standing alone on the western slopes of the Preseli Hills. Here in North Pembrokeshire, at sixty-eight and entirely self-taught, I am stepping away more from the digital acceleration of the modern world to give this chapter of my life to a deep, physical reading of the Welsh wilderness.

I work predominantly in oils. My style moves away from precise, photographic cartography towards a semi-abstract, expressive language. I am not seeking to record the exact contours of a carn or the coordinates of a cove. I want to capture the quick energy of being out in the elements: the sudden, gestural shift of light across the mountain, or the weight of a storm breaking over the Atlantic.

The process always begins on foot, tracking the habits of a landscape that is constantly making and unmaking itself. It is shaped by long walks over the hills and raw, immediate field notes sketched in the teeth of the gales. The true translation happens back in the quiet of the studio, where the paintings develop through an intuitive, unhurried dialogue with the medium. Using large brushes, palette knives and only a few earth colours, I rely on whole-body strokes to record the physical memory of the place.

For me, the canvas is where the materiality of oil paint and the transience of the landscape collide. I am fascinated by the paradox of the medium: a painting can be nothing more than its ancient self, coloured “thick oily mud” scraped from the earth, and yet still hold the immense, luminous space and shifting light of the Welsh hills and coastline.

Weight is what I feel; light is what I chase. It is a pursuit that connects me to a long lineage of landscape writers and painters who have looked deeply into the wild: the turbulent skies of Constable and Turner, the heavy energy of David Bomberg, the fierce coastal intimacy of British Artist Joan Eardley, and the muscular, torn landscapes of Welsh Painter David Tress.

Thank you for finding your way to this solitary outpost.

With warm regards,
Aston Colley
Mountain west
Mountain West, Preseli Hills, Pembrokeshire