Up For The Downs

Some of our favourite paintings and best regional art galleries are associated with the south coast. David Dimbleby tells Mary Miers why.

- Mary Miers

What is it about the South Downs that makes them so seductive even when viewed through the dying light of a November afternoon? a thick sea-fret obscures all but the shadow of a wooded rise as my train approaches Polegate, but I can visualise those whale-backed forms with their beech hangars and ragged thorn bushes, their combes and chalk pits, hill forts and ancient barrows and the skeins of white-ribboned tracks that disappear over the rolling chalk hills.

Few landscapes convey such a defining image of Englishness and David Dimbleby, who has lived in East Sussex for 18 years, has written eloquently about the role that artists have played in shaping its physical and emotional character.

‘Anyone who has walked the Downs as I often do and who has seen any paintings of them cannot fail to be seduced by the images they have seen: the Downs like atlantic rollers thundering in from the sea; the Downs as abstract shapes, angular fields, some green, some striped with plough; the Downs marked out by chalk tracks winding up the hills and disappearing over their crests. and who could forget the Downs as the setting for Paul Nash’s wartime paintings of vapour trails in the sky… however much you want to have your own private image of the Downs you cannot escape what others have shown you.’

In 2005, Mr Dimbleby made a BBC series that explored the significance of painting in connecting us to landscape while aiming to popularise art to a wider audience. A Picture of Britain took him to parts of the country he had never visited and, in the accompanying book, he writes of ‘the prodigious variety of scenery and an infinite variety of light which changes the way that scenery looks’.