This selection of recent paintings has been inspired by the hills of mid Wales where I lived from 2007-9 and other special places I have visited over the last few years.
The pathways in these pictures lead in or out of the landscapes, depending upon your point of view. The figures are an integral part of the larger landscape; humanity’s importance placed in perspective by the greater world they inhabit.
Some are based on real places I have visited and others entirely from my imagination. All are romantic interpretations of the British landscape, womb-like and protective of the individual nestling there.
The series of Man on a Laptop pictures began when I was asked to contribute a picture to an auction for the Campaign to Protect Rural England. The resulting image was the composition which features here Man on a Laptop II, originally just a line drawing.
Samuel Palmer was my inspiration for these works, and from him John Minton and the neo-romantic artists of the 1940s; Palmer was escaping from and reacting to the rise of the Industrial Revolution by creating a visionary romantic world away from the smoke and the squalor, the Neo-romantics escaping from the horrors of the Second World War into the landscapes of our romantic island.
Escaping from London and living in Wales allowed me to see that these bucolic idylls still exist just a few miles from towns and cities. I could walk from my house down these lanes I have drawn, realising how unchanged and special they are, while using my mobile phone or sitting under a tree using my laptop; our own technological revolution and thirst for energy and resources now the threat to these scarce and beautiful landscapes.
Kit Boyd 
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