For Clipped-in, the group of artists behind Castle Park Art Centre's upcoming exhibition, Beyond Landscape, this has been a very strange year.

The five friends and colleagues, who work across a variety of media, from textiles to ceramics to charcoal, are united by their love of mountaineering, an activity which inspires many of their pieces.

Usually, therefore, the artists would immerse themselves in the landscapes of Britain, Europe and beyond, drawing from mountain and seascapes in the creation of their work.

However, earlier this year, just as the group decided on Beyond Landscape as the theme of their latest exhibition, the Covid-19 pandemic promptly put paid to any hope of interacting with these natural environments in person.

In this series of articles, I speak with Clipped-in's artists about the effect of lockdown on their work, as well as their vision for the Beyond Landscape exhibition.

Andrew Croughton

Once he and his fellow Clipped In members had decided on the Beyond Landscape theme, photographer and artist, Andrew Croughton, planned various trips out into the natural environment, including a visit to Scotland to photograph the Milky Way.

However, in March, with Covid steamrollering these ideas, he was forced to rethink his approach to the project, moving his focus from photography to painting.

"Being locked in at home has changed our opinions of the title itself. I've gone back through my old photographs from trips years ago, and worked from those. I've tried to express what it was like to be in these places, rather than just visual representations of the scene," he tells me.

Annapurna South Face

For example, Andrew's piece, Annapurna South Face (pictured above), is based on photographs from a hiking trip to the Himalayas that he undertook back in 1994. In the painting, the deep blues and blacks of the night sky contrast cleanly with the moony white of the snowy peaks, so that you can almost feel the bite of the mountain air.

"It was about 2 o'clock in the morning, and we'd been told to go outside because the clouds were clearing," Andrew explains.

"I was at Annapurna base camp, and I was surrounded by this ring of snow-capped mountains, with the stars and the moon just coming out."

Andrew has extended the painting over the edges of the frame, so reflecting that "it doesn't end; the picture just keeps going. Like how the landscape doesn't end. You see what you see but over the horizon there's more."

As the image reaches out of its canvas and towards the viewer, it evokes the all-consuming magnitude of the mountains Andrew loves to explore, the wild vastness of their many shapes and moods.

It is this sensory, emotive response to the landscape which Andrew hopes to foreground in his work. While he relies on photographs to form the basic outlines of his paintings, he tries to overlay these images with a sense of the feeling of a place, and the memories that it holds.

"I use the photographs as the 'under painting' as it were, saying: "I've been there and this is what I managed to photograph." But as you probably know, when you take a photograph of something, you think it's great at the time, and then you get it home and you think "that's not exactly how I saw it."

"And so I try, when I'm painting, to add in a bit of the sensation you were feeling while you were there, rather than just copying the photograph," he explains.

Ben Nevis and Carn Mor Dearg Arete

So, while creating a wintry scene like Ben Nevis and Carn Mor Dearg Arete, Andrew will employ a "semi monochromatic" palette of cold blues and greys, even if the photo he is working from reflects a sunset of warm yellows and oranges.

In this way, his photographs form a sort of photo negative which is then imbued with all the colour and expression of sensation and personal experience.

As Andrew tells me: "It's about trying to get that feeling, when you look at the painting and can feel the wind blowing in your face or the snow landing around you or the quietness of it on the ground."

The Beyond Landscape exhibition will run from Wednesday 16th September – Wednesday 28th October at the Castle Park Arts Centre gallery. Entry is free and the centre is open Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-4pm.

You can find out more about Clipped-In, including commissions and previous exhibitions, here:

Andrew can be contacted at: [email protected]