David O'Connor

My studio is in the Wylye Valley village of Heytesbury where I have lived for 30 years. I came to Wiltshire to discover the world created by the painter Paul Nash and inspired by his work have begun to create my own Wiltshire. I first saw Nash’s work in my school 6 th form library on the Wirral and fell in love with his photographs and paintings of the rolling chalk Downland and ridges topped with Bronze Age Barrows and Beech wood clumps. His photographs of the Avenue at Avebury captured the depth of antiquity in a landscape I just had to be in.

I want to create paintings which say without doubt….. “THIS IS WILTSHIRE”. The colours in my work are bold and striking, attempting to capture the memory of sun-drenched summer walks across the plain, along the Ridgeway to Avebury, across the undiscovered West Wiltshire Downs and down the Wylye Valley.

This ancient and mystical landscape is now overlaid with the geometry of modern farming however the past is not far from the surface. As I walk I collect Neolithic flint tools and I am struck by the awareness that I am walking the same soil as the people who built Stonehenge.

Colour and pattern are what excites me as I try to create a balance between what I see, what I
recollect and the wish to construct something more than simple representation.

From this artist