A River Runs Through It

Matthew Rice is inspired by the work of a Norfolk artist who is keeping the English tradition of good landscape painting alive

LANDSCAPE is dead’ stated the manifesto of a recent fine-art degree-show installation in a large, gloomy room lined with plywood. Looking at the group of dreary, muted paintings covering the walls, many viewers must have doubted whether that quintessentially English component of the canon of art, at which so many of our painters have excelled, now has any future.

How do artists look at the landscape? More particularly, how do they look at it in a way that makes others look twice and begin to digest their interpretation? Drawing is really turbo-charged looking, looking with intent in order to show others what you see. Skill in draughtsmanship is the first pre-requisite, but, without an idea, it’s hard to get beyond the predictable.

Tor Falcon’s ‘Rivers of Norfolk’ series comprises a set of more than 200 drawings made between 2016 and 2019. She explores the network of unexceptional and, for the most part, unheard-of rivers that reticulate Britain’s fourth-biggest county.