About the artist.
Christopher Witchall studied Fine Art painting at York School of Art and Preston Polytechnic in the early 1970s and has continued to paint and regularly exhibit since.He is a painter who draws inspiration from the landscape of Britain and France, but it is the landscape of East Anglia and in particular of the flat land and vast skies of the Fens around his home town of Ely for which he is best known. The subject of these paintings is the peaceful isolation experienced in this landscape - often focusing on lonely farm buildings with their wall of windbreaking conifers - but it is the enormous skies that have prominence, with up to three-quaters of the canvas given up to them.
His main influence is photography and film which is evident in the way the landscape is composed and cropped with a photographers eye. "My paintings all begin with a photographic image but for me a photograph is not quiet enough. I love the painting process and somehow, paintings seem more persuasive than photographs".
Although traditional in subject matter and technique, it is their resemblance to photography in both composition and degree of realism that make them appear so contemporary.