10 of the West Midland’s most radical landscape painters are being recognised with a major, free-to view exhibition, VISTA: Midlands Landscape Painting Today, which runs from 23 September - 10 October at The Courtyard Gallery at The Core, Solihull.

These established and leading local painters have framed the extraordinary in the everyday, the sublime in the suburbs, and the mysterious beauty of Birmingham in more than 30 landscape paintings which invite new perspectives on a region too often overlooked, forgotten or framed in a negative light.

Taking the timeless tradition of landscape painting into their own hands, many of the artists in this show  reinvigorate it with compelling visions of Birmingham's industrial edgelands and urban spaces.

For instance, through his nocturnal car park paintings, Graham Chorlton reflects on city life:
“As we move through these spaces it is the overlooked, the liminal, the peripheral which are
important. Places which are everyday, such as car parks, roads and pavements can seem
transformed into something extraordinary by the action of light. This may be full daylight,
dusk or night, but in moments of stillness a new world is created which might correspond to
the viewers experience, mood or history.”

Shaun Morris also explores empty spaces after dark across the West Midlands, casting them in dramatic shadows. “Things look so different at night, it’s a different experience and I like the quietness, when things look more uncanny.”

Sharing this magical realist approach to painting, Carolyn Blake gives the unremarkable a poetic presence through her use of light and colour. She takes viewers down railway tracks and past abandoned buildings, seeking the intriguing in the ordinary. While stripping away unnecessary details from images, the artist adds a ground of apricot orange, using this “memory colour” to cast hues of nostalgia on paintings such as ‘Along the edges of great forests’.

Edgelands is a central theme in this show, and Paul Newman depicts broken landscapes with ruins. In his major diptych, ‘Birmingham Wholesale Wastelands: Dusk till Dawn’ he has captured the changing landscape of the demolished 900 year old Wholesale Markets in cinematic terms and a surreal palette of dusty pinks and muted purples.

Adopting a similar surrealist palette and approach is Tara Harris. In her words, she is most “interested in landscape as something psychological and emotional — shaped by memory, atmosphere, place and our relationship with the natural world.”

Painting intuitively, she creates otherworldly spaces defined by ambiguity and strange architectural forms. Architectural vistas are also the subject of Suminder Virk who draws inspiration from the sharp angles, clean lines, and repetitive geometric patterns of Brutalist and Modernist architecture in her dual homelands of Britain and India. Through the motifs of buildings, texture, and colour, she delves into personal memories, nostalgia, and a strong visual connection to her Indian heritage.

Cristina Gardiner also investigates architectural structures and geometric harmony in her abstract paintings, where intriguing shadows play across man-made structures to create fragmented picture planes.

Meanwhile, Paul Lemmon creates shimmering ‘cyberscapes’, defined by dazzling colour contrasts, pixel patterns and glitch effects. These kaleidoscopic oil paintings reflect our information age, while inviting viewers to reengage with reality. As he says: “I've ventured into the digital forest to create something that's aesthetically beautiful, like a woodland or bed of roses, turning the algorithms’ black box into visions of colour and light.”

For David Howell, it is the real-life forest which is his source of inspiration. In thickly painted canvases, he creates a wild tangle of foliage, rough edges, and abstracted bark which assume a sculptural quality.

Through painting, he investigates our ever changing relationship with the natural environment, explaining: “I'm interested in how we experience landscape in its physical sense, how we record it visually through maps, photography and the painted image.”

Annette Pugh is also interested in the act of painting itself. “When I paint the landscape I immerse myself in the process…the intensity and repetition of my mark making are akin to ‘being in that place’. My images recall locations that I have encountered on walks and then visited over and over, to experience their atmosphere and quietude throughout the seasons.”

Her works, such as ‘The Swing’, portray places encountered through foliage; the very edges of water, overgrown and heightened by unreal colour. The paintings record what is hidden, scenes that are secretive and devoid of human presence. Never totally still, they occupy a space that is ‘just on the edge of restlessness’.

Pugh has said: “It is a privilege to showcase works in VISTA, an exhibition highlighting the extraordinary wealth of painting talent, both established and emerging, within our region. With so many artists exploring the theme of landscape I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the conversation between such different works and styles.”

Through VISTA, viewers are invited to see some of the very best landscape painting today, to stop and wonder at sites which aren’t typically visited as destinations but passed through, and to rediscover ordinary places as spaces of possibility