Rachel Mills Fine Art South Yorkshire, United Kingdom

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My favourite subject is the English countryside, especially trees, and I am captivated by low light and the challenge of trying to capture it in oils. I love to use oil paint but oil pastels and oil sticks are my deepest passion.

I spend a lot of time walking in the places I love near where I live, noticing how light moves through trees and across water. I take photographs, but what stays with me is the feeling of being there and the atmosphere I experience. The depth of colour, the shapes of shadows, the temperature in the air, these are the elements I want to express. In the studio, I lay out my oil pastels or sticks and begin building the landscape using dark bold marks and travelling lines. I don’t make much of a preliminary sketch, just some quick guide lines, as I like to keep every mark as expressive and intuitive as possible. I love the way that oil sticks remove all the barriers between me and the colours so I can just grab them and express how I felt in the moment. Trees often sit at the centre of my work. I return to them again and again for their structure, their rhythm, and the way they hold light. I feel that they often form the skeleton of my composition and I build the rest of the painting around their branches, but the focal point in my work is often low light as I love the challenge of trying to capture the unique and magical atmosphere it brings.