I waited till winter

‘These new paintings have been forming and gathering momentum in the pages of a sketchbook started during  the summer. Now they have been eked out in my freezing cold studio beneath Eagle cragg in Lydgate over the winter months.The colours are often  the weather I see in the plug hole that is the bottom and sides of the Calder valley during winter.

They are emotionally charged and form a kind of narrative. I guess you could call them emotional landscapes. They are made up of nostalgia and memory and nature absorbed, and a deep routed yearning for other worlds or the worlds that exist within me, as well as the personal things going on in this reality day to day.

Sometimes they feel like a safe place filled with horror.’

Lucy Atherton attended the Royal college of Art, London, studying Illustration M.A.