Higger Gloria Painting

Born in Barnet in 1957, my parents moved to Sheffield on the edge of the peak district before I was two. The landscape of the peak district has been an entraining influence on my life and in spite of leaving the area to work first in London then later in Dorset I always knew eventually I would be drawn back to those hills.

I paint peak district landscapes in styles between classic and modern on canvases using a mix of acrylics and oils.

Acrylics provide speed and intensity, oils provide the potential for subtleties of colour and glazes.

Landscape painting to me is not about the technique of applying paint to a canvas, it is about the way the eye and the brain knows, interprets and understands the effect of light on coloured surfaces.

Our image of the world is based purely on reflected light, its colour, intensity, saturation and focus and to that extent all of it is an illusion.

Our perception is based on what Neuro scientists have theorised as "The brains best guess" theory of perception.

I strive to emote memories in the viewer of landscapes seen before by the use of what are only, after all, merely two dimensional painted cues.

I am fascinated with the interplay of light, colour and meaning, our eyes are a part of our brain and what we see with is modelled into reality by our minds and this is what I am exploring in my work.

My Father and his father before him were painters too - I like to think we have all been trying to understand the way we see landscape.