And then it's gone...: Oliver Akers Douglas, Recent British Paintings

"The mood of this collection feels to me particularly bittersweet, or perhaps more precisely I should call it joyful-sad. This phrase goes a little way to describe the poignant mix of feelings that British landscape seems to inspire. 'Summers lease is all too brief', as the sonnet goes. I like the idea of painting serving no grand purpose, other than to convey what it is like to be alive at a certain time and place. So if there is any point to my work, it is in distilling that rush of excitement I experience on encountering a dynamic effect in the landscape, tinged as it always is by the certain knowledge of its passing.

These days we look at the entire natural world with an added sense of jeopardy. It is almost too painful to acknowledge the precarious nature of these different environments where I spend my time, even while I revel in their distinctive charms. Several of the pictures in this collection feature ash trees - for many centuries a characteristic fixture of the chalklands where I live and which are of course rapidly disappearing as the dieback disease spreads through the species. I have always loved their ragged glory, their buff colours in winter and the way they are often engulfed heroically in ivy. I feel in part that these pictures celebrate their final hurrah before, like the fate of the elm tree before them, they finally disappear from the British landscape altogether."