Artist Focus: Michael Fairclough

Michael Fairclough, known internationally for his impressionistic landscape and seascapes paintings, is represented in many public collections including the V & A in London, the New York Public Library and the European Parliament.

Following his previous exhibition at the New Ashgate Gallery and the completion of the Meteorological Office commission in 2004, two linked developments have taken place. Firstly the sky and it’s phenomena have become the over-arching subjects of his paintings. The sea has become more a means of reflecting and echoing the sky, the land more a perspective above which the space of the sky rises.

“I have never had the experience of sailing and so have never been a seascape artist, though the sea features often in my paintings. I have walked the land and through that knowledge have produced landscapes that recall that experience.

That land is now dissolving as the sky starts to envelope it – the result of the recent second development, that of learning to fly gliders and use the air itself, beginning to get to know the sky by being up in it, following the buzzards”.