Oliver Dorrell makes paintings on long walks. The walks are inspirations for the work but also integral to it. He carries with him sized silk, a single collapsible stretcher frame, gum Arabic and dry pigment so he can set up temporary studios in mountain huts, shelters, barns or picnic benches. Often, these walks link two cities across a wilderness and are prompted by art history or literature. For example, in October and November 2022, he walked across the Alps from Milan to Munich. It was a walk inspired by the Alpine journey Bruegel made in 1554.
Having set up a temporary studio, his intention might be to paint something he’d seen or felt along the way; like the lonely feeling of being watched by a chamois; or the futuristic elegance of a flyover plugging into a mountain side tunnel; or an absent glacier; or the sensation of rain from under an umbrella. The intention, however, has to compete with the restrictions caused by weather — this could be the cold, or a blizzard forecast — and the exertion of traveling on foot through the landscapes, and the act of folding, carrying and re-stretching the silk, as well as the awkwardness of making watercolours from dry pigment and silk. These antagonistic things resolve into spontaneous paintings, creased and worn by their travels, and which, mounted on wood and framed behind glass after his walk, become fragile artifacts to a physical, more primordial, understanding of our modern world.
