Artists that have influenced me:; Turner, Constable, John Martin and Peter Kennard

While in more recent works Ravilious and Nash have been important to my work my first inspiration to follow my mother and become an artist came from a visit to the Clore Gallery in London after it opened in the late 1980's.

It was this painting that started it for me. There is the sense of movement and drama and the back story about Turner being tied to the mast during the snowstorm in the channel that the work depicts.

 The Image above is a very large canvas by the English artist John Martin that hangs in the Tate called The Great Day of His Wrath. There is something very cinematic about Martin's work that I enjoy.

Here is another example of John Martin's work, like the painting featured above it has a biblical theme, the title is Before the Deluge. Martin was well loved by the general public but often disparaged by his contemporaries. Because while his work was dramatic at its core it was in step with popular morality of the time. Constable also produced work that was technically accomplished and popular.

The image above is John Constable 's landscape The Hay wain a painting that typifies the appeal to sentimental nationalism, which although I'd like to claim to be immune to still resonates with me at some level. However the photo-collage by Peter Kennard featured below is the antidote to that sentimentalism because he lampoons that sentimental view of a romantic English landscape with the unpleasant reality of the UK as it is now as a vassal state of the declining American empire.

Peter Kennard's work also interests me because he in a way defiles the landscape by filling the eponymous Haywain with nuclear weapons.