Artist based in London

   I’ve begun to make painting on long walks. On these walks, I carry sized silk, stretcher bars, gum arabic and dry pigment so I can set up temporary studios in mountain huts, barns or hotels. Often these walks link two cities. For example, in October and November 2022, I walked across the Alps from Milan to Munich. It was a walk inspired by the Alpine journey Bruegel made in 1554, a journey that made a lasting impression on the landscape side of his paintings and drawings. Another walk was from Sheffield to Manchester; and another, on skis, from Innsbruck up to a mountain hut.

            Having established a temporary studio during a walk, I might intend to paint something I saw or felt along the way. These could be echos of the wider world, like a soldier emerging from a white-out, rifle raised, to shout that I’d skied into a military zone; or an absent glacier; or something more simple, like the loneliness of being watched by a chamois; or a phenomenological understanding, like how walking long distances can align geographic features, human habitation and landscape painting into sharp focus. My intentions, however, have to compete with restrictions caused by weather, for example, the cold or a blizzard forecast, and also the exertion of walking through the landscapes, as well as the action of folding, carrying and re-stretching my silk supports. 

         Despite myself, these antagonistic things end up as spontaneous paintings, creased and worn by their travels, and which, framed behind glass after my walk, become fragile artifacts, to the physical, more primordial way of understanding our modern world through traveling on foot.

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All work for sale, please contact the artist dorrello@gmail.com

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