Graham Ovenden is the foremost exponent of British landscape painting today, in the traditional and visionary sense. Although a love of the landscape runs deep within British art and underlies most of twentieth century British abstract painting, there have only existed a few artists whose sense of a spirituality within the countryside emerges in their work with true vision.

Abandoning London in 1975 for the West Country, Graham Ovenden co-founded a group of artists whose aim was to cultivate a new Romanticism. Openly acknowledging the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and, more important, Samuel Palmer and ‘The Ancients’, they called themselves ‘The Brotherhood of Ruralists’. Alongside Graham Ovenden and his wife Annie were Peter Blake, his then wife Jann Haworth, Graham Arnold, Ann Arnold and David Inshaw.

Graham Ovenden’s magical paintings of the countryside around his neo-gothic house on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall are mystical celebrations of nature. Each one is painted with tiny brushes in painstaking glazes, layer upon layer, in true Pre-Raphaelite technique. Graham is a fervent admirer of Ruskin and his famous dictum from the close of the first volume of Modern Painters: Go to Nature… rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing. Though inspired by the natural world he does not follow Ruskin literally, for it is perhaps William Michael Rossetti’s description of Pre-Raphaelite principles that has become his true guide:

To have genuine ideas to express, to study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them, to sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote and most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.

In an interview with Sir Alistair Johnston in September 1999, Graham Ovenden discussed motives and inspirations behind his Ruralist vision. An ideal bound up with a ‘mystic Arcadia’ and the ‘girl-child’, where the origins of English landscape painting are to be found in Celtic and Christian Pantheism: back to the roots of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, further, the first English poets, then taking its progression through. Its summits being William Blake and Samuel Palmer, ending up in this century with Paul Nash, Spencer, and artists of a like nature. In the midst of his Arcadian vision is the ‘girl-child’: a part of nature, an organic part of nature, and therefore has the same validity as a growing tree. It's no coincidence that most of my landscape paintings deal with spring: ecstasy burgeoning forth. So one is the metaphor for the other and vice-versa.