I am delighted that Canvas Galleries are showing my work in their beautiful new gallery on the Lisburn Road Belfast. It is a splendid setting for contemporary art spread over two large street facing floors.

My first pieces on display explore a cause dear to my heart, and that is the right of everyone to enjoy the landscape around us. When I look at a landscape painting, I don’t usually get the sense of that landscape being ‘owned’ in the same way as when I look at representations of a city. It is as if the openness of a landscape painting transcends all societal impact, allowing one to lose oneself in its delight, spirit and inspiration.

Landscapes are, of course, every bit as ‘owned’ as cities but what differs is public access to those pictorial realms. While cities have structured public access routes provided by streets and promenades, public access to our pictorial landscapes varies wildly. Whilst Scotland enjoys a legal ‘right to roam’ providing complete public access throughout her landscapes, the rest of the UK relies on Public Right Of Ways of which there are 140,000 miles in England and Wales, but only a paltry 123 miles in Northern Ireland.

It is these Forbidden Landscapes of Northern Ireland that I seek to capture in my intense abstract acrylics.

These paintings are constructed on the canvas, assembled by layering painterly marks, scratched and sandpapered surfaces, scraped and dissolved paint, granulated paint, sponged paint and drip marks.

Close up the intensity of the construction, like the bricks and blocks of a building, is visible and the textures are revealed. Standing back the landscape emerges and you can, like me, be within it.