Rob Pountney

Rob Pountney’s landscape art is rooted in a lifelong fascination with the Wessex region of southern England and its rich tapestry of natural, historical and archaeological features. His work is also shaped by a deep engagement with Thomas Hardy’s verbal‑visual interpretations of the Wessex landscape — an interest that developed during his Fine Art studies and later through doctoral research in English Literature.

Much of his practice centres on the varied terrains of Dorset — its downlands, heaths, river valleys, earthworks and barrows — landscapes that speak of time and reveal visual paradoxes created by shifting perspectives between old and new, permanence and fragility, life and death. His predominant use of chiaroscuro heightens these tensions, dramatising the relationship between past and present, the visible and the unseen. Through contours, curves, lines, circles and angles, his drawings invite contemplation of the long sequence of natural and human events that have shaped these ancient places.