Autumn Sunset - Oil on Board

The air is fresh and sweet in autumn, ripe still with summer's last excess, and mingled scent of wasp-scoured fruit and tang of leaves, and moist ploughed earth linger on until winter closes the door. In recent years we have had a succession of golden Octobers, the light slowly rising through morning mists and on up into mild days of calm even sunshine, shadows gathering more darkly about the woods and reaching far across the fields because the sun climbs so little now, yet still lingeringly rules the season.

At such a time an afternoon's walk among these Devon lanes opens views that declare the fulfilment of the year. The whole landscape proclaims its accomplishment in a sun-varnished fugue of variate russets, and vivid yellows, as the woods prepare to lay down their glory, and the plough lays the red earth bare.

Sandwiched between the rolling green plateau of Exmoor in the north and to the south the ancient but only half worn-down granite massif of Dartmoor, mid Devon is visited by complex air currents. These changing atmospheres quite frequently give rise to spectacular sunsets. And although October does not have a monopoly of this phenomenon, the month is often graced with the most beautiful evening skies. As well as the sheer delight of the shimmering clouds, bedazzling in their array of colour from snow white to delicate pink to flaming red and yellow, where even the shadows glow like ash bedded embers in a great fire, and the illuminations fade from the magnificent epicentre of golden light into the darker ochre and purple shade of distant vapours, there is also, beyond all this, the mysterious depth of the sweeping sky of which the sunset is but a part. For the sun's play upon the kaleidoscopic palette of atmospheric colours is not only a climactic farewell, but also a prelude to something else - the hushed onset of night. Soon the skies that were already deep with pellucid tranquillity will open to the immeasurable depths of the heavens. As perhaps Venus or Jupiter begin to sparkle above the horizon, and the moon also rises, followed gently by the orchestral procession of countless stars, we realise that the sun had capped the vault above and roofed us in, and is gone so that other mysteries might be proclaimed.

But in my picture, though the dark and silver beauty of the night is only an hour away, the sun still fiercely holds the throne of day. As it sinks still lower it becomes ever more determinedly the focus of attention, close to the horizon without rival the absolute vanishing point and centre of all perspective. Even if you turn your back to the light and wait long enough to rest your eyes and begin to enjoy the subtle touches of pink where veiled clouds blush softly against the gathering eastern shadows, still you cannot ignore that there is only one centre to the scene, one source, one light, one line of sight, and even the sea-blue darkness of other directions is only the velvet upon which the sunset diamonds display their flashing splendour.

It is this centrality of the evening sun that I especially wanted to capture in the painting, an unavoidable lyricism in the way that earth and trees and clouds and sky are absorbed into its shining, each radiant in borrowed magnificence, so lovely in themselves, yet all made one in common harmony. Almost every year there comes an October evening when the sun, poised in the west, holds the landscape in drawn-out suspense and there offers the last of the summer wine poured out from a red-gold glowing pitcher, where all the perfumed memories of recent months are distilled into one last draught.

Part of the inspiration of this picture arises from allowing the brush to explore the natural patterns of the beech board grain. My hope was that the poetry of the painting would arise as much from the curves of the wood, as from my own subjective appreciation of the scene.

back