Luke McTaggart
'I am a Landscape Painter based in Amble, Northumberland in my final year of study for a degree in Fine Art at Northumbria University. I work exclusively within the field of painting and am influenced by romanticism, along with more recent artistic movements such as abstract expressionism. In my work I seek to address questions about our relationships with different types of landscapes alongside the impacts that local conditions such as development have on them.'
'Foggy Morning, The Braid' 2020, Acrylic and mud on paper
My hometown of Amble is wrapped up in the tumult of ever-increasing tourist numbers. The strain on local infrastructure is beginning to raise a myriad of social and ecological questions. The salt marshes on the Braid, just outside Amble, sit on the edge of the Northumberland Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. This painting depicts these marshes and is painted upon a base layer of mud collected from there, onto which I have layered thin washes of Acrylic. The landscape on this boundary between two Northumberlands, the bucolic countryside covered by the AONB, and post-industrial South Northumberland, marred by coal mining, deeply interests me and lies at the base of my practice. In which I am seeking to probe the way that we value certain types of landscape over others and how they are impacted by local conditions.
