A luminous celebration of our world

In his latest exhibition at the Touchstones Gallery, artist Steve Garside has brought together a collection of rich and luminous landscapes from locations across the world.

When cheap travel is the norm, and experiencing the world’s variety and beauty firsthand is often regarded as a right rather than a privilege, the exhibition addresses the issues of travel and our environmental responsibilities.

The landscapes are from various places including America, Istanbul, Italy, Scotland and Dubai.

But for Garside, the work itself is the journey. Exploiting the technology of the digital age he has explored the world while standing still, painting his pictures using other people’s travel photographs posted on Facebook.

While this means that the artist’s experience of the landscape itself is second-hand, his response to the photographs is expressive and immediate and the result is a series of paintings that shimmer and glow with restless energy. The mood at the core of these pictures is a Turneresque love of light and nature, and the influence of Turner, as well as the Impressionists, is clear in the loose and energetically applied paint. And just as the work of these artists was sometimes almost abstract, so Garside’s pictures waver between realistic scenes to images that are more about mood and colours.

A self-taught artist, Garside started painting when he was given a set of paintbrushes by a friend ten years ago. He admits his style can be random and experimental and says: "Each time I do a painting I learn a new trick." What this also means is that he is not afraid of trial and error, allowing him to be open to influences and ideas as he works.

The exhibition includes a display including poetry by children from St Vincent’s RC Primary School on the theme of the environment, and an audio track of poetry readings by some of the children.

The paintings celebrate nature but the children’s poems also remind us of the threat we pose to these very things we celebrate. As Garside says in his exhibition notes: "We travel the globe and take photographs for our albums, while our carbon footprint threatens the natural beauty of the landscapes we collect to show others."

This exhibition is a celebration of that variety and beauty but without the environmental cost.