Oliver Dorrell is a British artist who paints while walking long distances, often across mountains, borders, or landscapes under geopolitical, climatic, historical or religious pressure. Each walk usually has an art historical or literary impetus, and the paintings he makes along the way are shaped by the conditions they are made in: weather, altitude, solitude or fatigue.
In 2022, he walked from Milan to Munich, loosely following the route the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel took over the Alps in 1554. That journey became the exhibition Walking After Bruegel. More recently, he made a winter walk through the mountains of Wales, and travelled on skis through the Austrian Alps. Earlier travels have taken him to the Caucasus Mountains of Dagestan, and the pilgrimage town of Tirupati in Southern India. He often works alongside local artists, journalists or pilgrims.
This way of painting developed from an interest in how landscapes carry layered histories, especially in politically charged or culturally complex regions. The work itself is necessarily spontaneous and portable. He paints in mountain huts, hotels, forests, and on hillsides. The paper or silk supports crease and wear in his rucksack, and when they are framed behind glass afterwards, they become fragile artefacts of the landscapes they travelled.
A passage from a recent travel text Dorrell wrote while in Wales and it includes the title of his series THE CRASH OF BOTTLE BANKS:
And then the madness of mountain streams begins. It happens every time you sleep by them. Tonight you hear the hammering of next door builders, and a radio tuning in and out of music stations. Tomorrow, below Rhinog Fach, you will hear the crash of bottle banks, and a tannoy prattling at a country fair. Previous nights have been Hindi music on an overnight coach, a nearby rave, women quarrelling, the shouts of angry men searching for trespassers. You turn in your sleeping bag, blind as a grub. Is this the meaning of a babbling brook you think, but these babblings crowd with purpose. You think of river spirits and moth coated tribes tracking up retreating glaciers. When the children laugh, you pull your hat over your ears. Then in the morning the rivers return to their gurgles and roars, and you are alone in your Gore-Tex, with your Ordnance Survey maps and pastoral watercolours.
