Observations on art

My interest in wind turbines as a subject for painting is partly aesthetic and partly environmental. My main theme has always been landscape, in particular the balance between natural and artificial elements. It is often assumed that all man-made structures are visually intrusive in the natural landscape, but the truth is that in most of Britain - especially in East Anglia, where I live - nearly every element of the landscape is man-made: field patterns, woods, roads, houses, furrows, ditches, hedges, barns, silos, railway lines, pylons . . . Not all are ugly, and they impose a sort of order and structure on the views we see. What interests me are the abstract patterns of colours, of strong, geometric shapes and of light and shade that underlie the landscape view.

Visiting wind farms around the country, I am struck by how different and changeable their relationship is to their surroundings, depending on the size and number of turbines, the type of landscape they are sited in, the weather and the quality of light. I rarely paint actual scenes, but work partly from imagination, simplifying and juxtaposing elements drawn from my observations.

One of the purposes of art is to help people see beauty in unexpected places. Wind turbines are an extremely powerful presence in the landscape or seascape, and to my mind are beautiful structures in their own right. They are as appropriate as the old windmills so beloved of landscape painters. We just need to get used to them.

Because I am a committed environmentalist, I also see them as benign presences in the landscape. The siting of wind farms has become a controversial issue. Everyone wants cheap electricity, but no one, it seems, wants to live near a wind farm or a nuclear power station. People act as though the "view" is something they own and can fix immutably for ever. But the countryside is a working environment and has always been in a state of change. As an artist, I find cooling towers or the dome of Sizewell B, our local nuclear power station, as interesting as turbines, and I have painted these, too - even though I would like to see them phased out and replaced by more wind farms, both onshore and offshore, and by other renewable energy sources.

I hope that my paintings will make people think about the issues of energy and climate change, and help to convince them that these structures are things of beauty and, in the right place, a dynamic addition to the landscape.

For more about Mark Beesley's work, please call 01394 382567 or visit www.axisweb.org/artist/markbeesley

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