Lindsey Hambleton

Lindsey Hambleton exhibits nationally at art fairs and galleries, and has been a professional painter for 20 years. 

Lindsey has painted from a very young age – the themes of trees, water and wildlife appearing in her work from these early days. She began a professional career in painting after studying art, and also environmental science at universities in Manchester.  It was during her degree that she realised the need to be creative full time, although the love of the environment and the scientific detail of zoology and ecology remain, and constantly inform her work.

Working mainly on wood panel, recent paintings are often large in scale, with compositions inspired by well known places in the Peak District and the Highlands.  The landscapes have strong structural elements, framed by trees, and balanced by strong light and open space.  Lindsey's largest work to date is 240 x 180 cm (limited only by the size of the studio door!), inspired by her local woodland and the winter floods.

Paintings are usually inspired by a specific and often familiar view, with sketches worked up in the studio where more abstract elements evolve.  Colours are inspired by the season and location, and heightened to enhance emotion and structure in the work. Central to Lindsey's work is the balance of colour and form, and just as important are the mood of the landscape and the pure sensation of colour itself. She uses big blocks of colour, graded subtly by the use of large brushes. Increasingly, pale open spaces feature within a composition, and water is reduced down to the essential reflections. Lindsey describes her practice as "being almost completely reliant on tree forms; I feel uncomfortably exposed in a treeless landscape, just as I do in a treeless painting".

In recent years, Lindsey has returned to her childhood passion of natural history, creating vivid and lively compositions of birds alongside her landscape work.  The backgrounds are as important as the subject – lush foliage, imagined landscapes, or illustrative sketches of her local nature reserve – reflecting the joy that she feels when bird watching and seeking out new species.  Occasionally a fox or badger appears amongst the trees, demonstrating to the viewer Lindsey's own feelings for the landscape.