Serendipity led me to paint by the Aegean on a retreat-come-holiday at a place I think of as "Hippy Holiday Camp."
At the welcome event I discovered that my chosen activities were all scheduled for the afternoons, leaving me wondering how I would spend my mornings. Next day I felt drawn to the open-air studio among the fig trees, immediately captivated by the flow of paint, I stayed. One morning we went to the local taverna for breakfast and to paint. The landlord wanted to buy my painting for his home. Taken aback, I wouldn't take his money but swapped my watercolour seascape for an ornament his wife had made with shells and a broken mirror….
Painting of the month
Plain Tree, 2025
I am currently focusing on the moods of the landscape near to my home at the base of Salisbury Plain.
Oil on board, framed.
47x40cms
£300
Texture, Light & Colour
There is alchemy in mixing colour to express radiance on the landscape, the shifting light and weather.
Colour is like music, working on emotion, irrespective of the subject of a painting.
I find poetry in my box of pigments and joy in the many ways to use the generosity of paint to see shape and space sharpen or blur.
There is satisfaction in creating texture: rough of rock, sharp of stone, scratch of branch, watered smooth of pebbles. There is visceral pleasure in conjuring a landscape by making and masking strong lines, hard and lost edges, and using tiny dots and skipping lines to enliven the canvas.
Kate Reeve-Edwards
“Jaqueline Mitton enjoys the rhythm of the landscape. As a horse-rider, she feels the land rolling underneath her, noticing each slight change of surface. Her eye is trained to look for potential dangers, so has sharpened over the years, absorbing both the way forward towards the horizon and the smaller details in front of her. Her landscapes are inspired by special places, yet details such as standing stones or burial sites might be enlarged to hold more of a focus.
For Mitton, the land carries a reminder of our smallness and temporariness. It has personal resonances too, by painting and exploring the landscape, Mitton excavates and honours these memories.”
