Oliver Dorrell is a British artist who makes paintings on long walks. These walks last many days or weeks, with the artist walking alone, and sleeping outside along the way. Often the walks link cities across a mountain range or moorland. For example in October and November 2022, he walked across the Alps from Milan to Munich, loosely in the footsteps of the 16th Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel. On this trip, he set up temporary studios in mountain huts, and painted on silk with dry pigment and gum arabic. He finds silk the lightest and most durable material for these longer trips. More recently, he’s been walking through the mountainous regions of Wales, where he’s been painting outside and on paper.

The paintings he makes on walks are necessarily spontaneous. Creased and worn by their travels and framed behind glass afterwards, they become almost relic-like, fragile artifacts to the physical, more primordial way of understanding our modern world through traveling on foot.