Exscape - Oil on Canvas

Rising on Exmoor quite close to the Bristol Channel on the north Devon coast, the River Exe flows for nearly fifty miles to its estuary at Exmouth in the south, mostly through steep-sided, wooded slopes leaning over narrow strips of flood meadow. Just after Bickleigh Mill the landscape begins to open out more widely for the last ten miles to Exeter, and at Stoke Canon, just four miles north of the city, is at its widest where the Exe is joined by the Culm. From these broader meadows the view across the water to more distant hills provides the tranquil setting for this painting which explores the dancing summer light and dappled shadows on the shining river surface.
The river is clean and in a good year, which for a fisherman in Devon means a wet one, the Exe can attract quite large numbers of salmon. The largest ever caught (in 1924) weighed almost thirty kilos. And the estuary is a haven of wild birds, including ducks and geese, avocet, redshank, plover, oyster catchers, teal, godwits, and occasionally great osprey fish-eagles on their twice-yearly migration between Scandinavia and the Cairngorm mountains in Scotland and their winter homes in Africa.
The Exe, like many other Devon rivers, rises on moorland slopes that usually look quite wet, but in fact hold little water. The underlying rocks are ancient and compacted very hard, and shed the rainfall quickly. So in wet weather the river rises fast and flows urgently. The Exe does not have the deep moodiness of the Thames, but always seems to convey something of the cheerfulness and the plunge and rush of its moorland source within sight of the Welsh mountains.
In composing this picture I had in mind the melodic structure of a Cezanne landscape. I wanted to make the colour shimmer from point to point in lucid free-flowing forms, pleasurable in themselves but also effective as description, to capture the joy of the Exe in summer.

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