Why the Malvern Hills Keep Appearing in My Work

When I first moved to Malvern, I didn't immediately start making work about the landscape around me.

I had grown up in Tehran, and the contrast between the two places was enormous. Malvern was beautiful, but it was also incredibly calm, and for the first couple of years I missed the energy of a big city. My work was still very much connected to my homeland. Its colours, memories and themes continued to appear in what I made. Looking back, perhaps making that work was also a way of keeping those memories fresh.

So my relationship with Malvern developed slowly.

I didn't arrive, look at the hills and suddenly feel that I had found my subject. Instead, the landscape crept into my work over years of living here, walking the same paths and seeing familiar places change with the weather, the light and the seasons.

Somewhere along the way, Malvern stopped being simply the beautiful place where I lived. I began to know it.

And I think there is a difference between seeing a landscape and knowing one.

Learning a landscape by walking through it

Much of that relationship has developed through walking.

When I walk now, I find myself noticing things constantly, but they aren't always the obvious views. Of course the Malvern Hills can be magnificent, particularly when you see the whole landscape opening up in front of you, but just as often it is a small detail that makes me stop.

Morning light might be coming through the branches of a tree and changing the colour of the sky behind it. A tree I have passed many times might suddenly look extraordinarily strong against a clear blue sky, while another seems delicate and almost full of movement. I notice the patterns made by leaves and branches, and sometimes I am already thinking about how that texture might be translated into marks in a future print or painting.

Colour catches my attention in the same way. I notice how two colours sit beside each other in the landscape, or how completely the atmosphere of a place changes in rain or fog. A familiar view on a bright sunny day can feel like an entirely different place when the hills disappear into mist.

But I am also drawn to the signs of people living within the landscape. A path fading away makes me wonder where it leads. Houses nestled between fields or beneath the hills make me imagine what it must be like to wake up there every morning and see that view.

These things don't necessarily become artworks. Most of them probably don't. But I think they accumulate.

Every walk adds something to the store of shapes, colours, textures and feelings that I carry back to the studio.

The places I find when nobody is looking for a view

Perhaps this is why I often prefer the less obvious routes.

The well-known paths around the Malvern Hills have spectacular views, but I am very drawn to the quieter ones, where there are fewer people and fewer distractions. In that solitude I feel more connected to what is around me. I slow down, look more closely and seem to notice things that I might otherwise walk straight past.

There is also an element of discovery that I love.

A path can turn and suddenly reveal an unexpected view through the trees. There might be an oddly shaped tree beside a field, a house sitting in a surprising position, or a slightly quirky arrangement of things that feels as though it could only exist in that particular hidden corner of the landscape.

Those moments interest me because they haven't been presented to me as something I am supposed to admire. I have simply come across them.

And perhaps that changes the way I remember them too. Instead of remembering a famous view of the Malvern Hills, I remember fragments: a tree, a roof between branches, the bend of a path, the shape of a field, a particular patch of colour.

Those fragments are much closer to the way my landscapes eventually begin to form.

I don't want to reproduce what I saw

I take a lot of photographs while I am walking, but the strange thing is that I hardly ever use them when I make the artwork.

At the moment I take a photograph, something has obviously interested me enough to want to keep it. But afterwards, the photograph itself seems to become less important. I very rarely sit in the studio trying to reproduce what the camera recorded.

Instead, I remember.

And memory is much less obedient than a photograph.

It keeps some things and loses others. A particular tree remains incredibly clear while everything around it disappears. I remember the way a house sat against a hill, but not necessarily the field beside it. I remember a colour, a feeling or the way the light made the whole landscape seem different for a few minutes.

When I begin making an artwork, I use those fragments freely.

A tree might come from one walk and a house from another. The fields might belong somewhere else entirely. I change the scale of things, move them around, take things away and add things that were never there. Several different places can end up inside the same image until I have created a landscape within a landscape.

You can see some of those imagined landscapes in my original linocut prints.

That isn't something I do reluctantly because I can't remember the original view. It is actually the part that interests me.

I don't want the photograph to dictate the artwork.

The photograph can tell me exactly what was there. Memory tells me what mattered.

What remains becomes part of the work

After living here for so long, some of the landscape has become so familiar that it enters my work without being deliberately invited.

I don't necessarily begin a piece thinking that I am going to make an image of Malvern. Yet when I look at the finished work, I sometimes recognise familiar shapes: the movement of the hills, houses sitting within the land, a certain kind of tree or the way fields divide the landscape.

They aren't always representations of actual places. They are more like echoes of them.

Malvern appears in my work even when the artwork isn't of Malvern. It has simply become part of the way I imagine a landscape.

I wrote more about the way the seasons here influence my work in The Changing Seasons of the Malvern Hills Through My Art.

The landscape outside my studio

There is one part of Malvern that has become so familiar to me that I would probably only understand its importance if it disappeared from my everyday life.

From my studio I can see a large tree at the top of the hills.

It isn't a famous landmark. I doubt many people would even pick it out from the landscape in the way I do. But I know exactly where it is. I see it every day, against different skies and through different seasons, and over time it has become a landmark of my own.

If I moved away from Malvern tomorrow, of course I would miss the hills themselves. But I think I would also miss that tree.

Perhaps that's what happens when you live with a landscape for a long time. The spectacular things gradually make room for smaller, more personal ones. Certain trees and paths become landmarks of your own.

And without quite realising it, you carry those things home.

They become memories, then fragments, and eventually some of them find their way into the things you make.

Malvern didn't enter my work immediately when I arrived here.

It took its time.

Perhaps I did too.