
Oil Painting by Jane Hirst
Dartmoor Flower Meadow Wild Scabious
Jane Hirst
Oil painting on Dartmoor remotely: an impermanent canvas, like a bird’s nest, a home no bigger than your hand, made of sticks, that blows away at the end of the nesting season. My paintings are my visual diaries, lists of rich undergrowth, peaty soils, and local species in wilder Dartmoor places. Oil brushed into my canvas, the ever- changing seasons of muted light and rich colour.
As I paint outdoors the weather is indifferent to my need for comfort and sometimes, I flounder in its arms. I am left wondering at species adaptability to natures extremes. High summer, it is too dry, and I am a parched painter, I hear adders in the moorland grass. Deep winter it’s too windy, wet, and cold and the wild ponies have come to snuffle the apple I have stored away in my rucksack pocket, greedily overturning my painting table in their ravenous haste.
Dartmoor Wild Scabious in Flower Meadows
Oil on Linen
26x20cm
Unframed