News

26/4/07 This is the first entry after my website has been improved by my son Sandy McClure (see his website www.inspinerate.com for some amazing videos of firespinning).

I'm starting to work on a new series of paintings of Dovedale in Derbyshire. Dovedale is a dramatic (well, dramatic for the generally rolling English landscape!) limestone gorge in the "White Peak" of the Peak District, a range of hills that runs northwards from Derbyshire through the rest of England as far as the Scottish border, where they join the southern Scottish hills.

I'm fascinated by rocks and the way the shape of the landscape reflects the variations in underlying geology. I think of the landscape as the skin, the expressive features, of the Earth, and when I paint it, I imagine the eons of weathering and other processes that have gone into producing the landscape I'm looking at.

I enjoy the way our landscape reflects our human history and relationship with the land, as well. In Britain and Ireland, the geology is so amazingly and uniquely varied - almost no other corner of the world has such a variety of rocks in such a small area - that the landscape changes quickly as you travel across it. As our weather and light conditions also change frequently, the landscape of the British Isles is constantly interesting.

My next exhibition