One big love affair

ARTIST Michael Bilton’s studio seems almost to be part of the Swaledale landscape – and not just because of the rain beating down on the glass roof. The Swale itself runs right past the house, its rushing and gurgling a constant background to Michael’s work.

Which is as it should be, for Michael’s work is all about Swaledale, as he lives and breathes it, experiences and finally transfers it on to big canvases – generally five or six feet square.

These are not your traditional landscapes, a glorified version of the photograph or picture postcard – although he could very easily do those too. These are more impressionistic, Swaledale as experienced by the artist.

“There’s a risk you take of being misunderstood,” says Michael.

Not really. Big, bold and powerful, it takes only the smallest of hints from the artist and you’re inside them too – the sun-bleached fields, the torrents of waterfalls, the startled flight of a heron. And above it all, the narrow strip of sky, as you see it when the hills soar right above your head.

It’s almost a love affair with the landscape and one that came fairly late in life.

Michael, 72, was born in Cambridge and spent most of his life in Leicestershire where he was head of Foundation Studies at Loughborough College of Art and Design. He was in his fifties when he discovered Swaledale.

“We were on a very roundabout route to visit Staithes as I was interested in the Staithes group of artists. But first we stayed at Fremington and as soon as we got here, I was gobsmacked.

I’d never seen anything like this before,” he says.

His partner Cindy Harris was driving . “With great difficulty,” says Michael, “because I was just getting so excited about everything I saw, going mad over this wonderful landscape. I bought a little notebook from the post office in Reeth and I was away. I knew, for the life I had left, this was going to be my subject.”

Michael was already an established artist. Alongside his day job he painted abstracts, mainly a reflection of his inner life. But Swaledale was to take him out of himself.

When he had the opportunity to take early retirement, he and Cindy moved to Grinton, near Reeth, and he started painting the dales.

“For two years, I got stuck in and worked without lifting my head,” he says.

Somehow the couple transformed the house, the old post office, which now manages to be both modern and traditional, comfortable and extremely stylish, and all the time Michael worked.

“Coming here was a new beginning. I was so overwhelmed by the beauty and drama all around me,” he says. “I’d been a bit of an amateur runner and here I went out in all weathers.

I didn’t want to see this landscape through a camera or from a car window, I wanted to be in it, part of it. I could get around quite quickly, trotting round, observing, bringing back ideas, feeding of what I’d seen and experienced.“ The weather rarely deterred him. From the golden glow of the untypically hot summer in which they moved up here – “when everything was baked yellow” – to the whiteout of the last two snowy winters and all the rain and storms in between, it’s all there.

“It provided some magic moments, lots of ways in. I love it when the clouds come down below the hill and the hilltops vanish into the clouds so there’s no clear line between them.

Or you can look at a hill reflecting on all its variations in all the different weather.”

The first painting exhibited in York City Art Gallery was “Storm over Carver Hill.”

On one occasion the violent weather seemed to make its way into the canvas. “There was so much disturbance that I was getting nowhere with my work, just making a mess of the canvas,”

says Michael. “Then we heard that the storms had brought down the Reeth swing bridge and suddenly all the chaos in my painting made sense. It came out as a painting called Fractured Landmark.”

The storm was a bit close to home too – he and Cindy had six feet of water swirling through their house. They’ve been flooded twice and had a fire too, but seem to accept it with resigned equanimity.

Michael’s canvases are large. Often six feet tall, they make an impact. “I like big things, things you have to get into. I don’t like just a collection of little coloured dots you can ignore,” he explains.

One of his most dramatic works is of the heather-burning on the grouse moors – fierce red and black smoke and flames leaping across the canvas. He has also done some slightly smaller studies on the same theme., which are equally stunning, the perfect way into his paintings and on a more domestic scale.

He works mainly in oil, but also uses enamels, “anything that will give me the texture and effect I want.” The canvases are heavily textured often with bits cut out and replaced. “I keep working away until I get things right,” he says. A work in progress looks like a giant jigsaw and also, strangely, like a writer’s plan of ideas and inspiration waiting to come together for the perfect finished work.

Gradually Michael’s work became known.

He has been twice selected for the Royal Academy; he has won awards and prizes; he has exhibited in many galleries throughout the region, including York City At Gallery, at Ripon Cathedral and at the Swaledale Festival and – in a reminder of his teaching days – he has taken part in a mentoring exercise with a young student in connection with the festival and the Bowes Museum.

With the constant help of the brilliantly supportive Cindy – who, since their move north, has also discovered her own artistic talents as a knitter using Swaledale wool – Michael has become a respected and admired part of the dales artistic community.

At an age when most people might considering winding down, he is as full of ideas and energy and enthusiasm as ever, eager to be striding through the landscape in all weathers or back in his studio trying to get it all onto canvas. “Whatever time I’ve got left on this earth, I’ll never tire of painting this landscape,” he says.