The most straightforward way to present a landscape in a painting is to go out, find a pleasant view, and paint.
I still do that, and tbh, those pictures seem to be popular.
BUT - all those hours standing and gazing at the world around me and I have come to realise that more or less everything I see is at least clothed through the actions of the people who have been here before us. And, after all, the reason I paint, as with every other artist, is for people to want to look at the painting.
Here is the dilemma - with the world facing this climate crisis, artists have an opportunity (a responsibility?) to use their art to put out a call on what is being done to the planet, but - will anybody want to hang such a painting on their wall?

Delacroix urged us to create ‘a feast for the eye’.

So here is the crux - can a landscape painting be pleasing to the eye while at the same time posing a reminder of the global challenges we face? Or does that push the work away from ‘pleasing’ into ‘interesting’?
This consciousness is resulting in my paintings are becoming less representational of pleasant scenes, but my natural style is vibrant and colourful. I have tried dark and gloomy, but that is just not me. my palette definitely flows toward ‘feast for the eye’.
My journey through landscape painting certainly began  with pleasant, representational pieces, but has progressed - this desire to make the viewer react to what they see with something beyond the warm glow of real or imagined evocation from nature has caused me to ‘extrapolate’ - to put real world features into a created setting - my purpose is to create an object (the painting) which will stand in its own right, not simply as an image of a place.
We are who we are, children of our times. I (happily) have not lived through the horror of war, but I can look to those who did to see art which is more challenging than ‘interesting’, conveying the experiences of the artist to put those issues large and central in front of the viewer.
For example, Guy de Montlaur created work which even now, 80 years later, challenges the horrors of war based on his lived experiences.  Rooted in cubism and flowing into abstract expressionism, his work is not about the landscape at all. He was of his time. My own journey is in my time when the landscape can and should be the site of OUR challenge - what to do about the climate?
A previous period when Landscape painting found its way to the top,was the early 19th century - Constable presented lovely reminders of the passing of the rural idyll. Caspar David Friedrich used his painting to pose questions  about the place of people in relation to the divine - the romance of infinity, mortality.
These artists succeeded in presenting pictorial spaces which resonated, obliging their viewers to use their own frames of reference, to pause for reflection and arrive at their own interpretation.
Maybe this is the next horizon on my own journey.

As we progress through our life, we learn. We feel comfortable with the familiar. We think we know what is ‘right’.
This is true of how we view the world around us - we crave the familiar, we take pictures of it, we put up paintings on our walls, paintings we like.
NOW - we are having to take on the idea that all of that might not actually be as ‘right’ as we thought.

Most of us live in places where other people have lived for generations before us, and that means the areas where we grew up, those areas we love to look at, have been sculpted, shaped and styled by those previous generations.

What I didn’t know when I painted these trees, is that the man-made landscape around them has cut them off from the underground network of microfibres which, in a forest, would connect them to all the other trees around them.
I DID understand that the acorns they produce will not thrive, as they land in a field and will be eaten sooner or later.
But, together, these new realities mean that this image is doomed. Sooner or later, and probably sooner than would be the case if these trees were surrounded by others of their kind, these trees will fall down and there will be none to take their place.
I now understand that trees really should be grown, or allowed to grow, close to others like them.
Which means that this is a shout out for hedgerows!
BIG hedgerows, wide enough to let things grow, and regenerate.

I respect most farmers. They know a lot more about these things than I ever will, and they care about the landscapes that are in their custody. I would like to know how urbanites like me can help. We should be working together.
Every weekend, the hills in this painting are crowded with people, who mostly come from cities. 
We go there because of the scenery - it is impressive. But my point is, maybe we need to re-learn, reprogramme if you like, the way we think about what is ‘nice’ to look at.
Why are so many of our hills completely bare of anything except grass?
Might it not be better to encourage diversity? Trees have been harvested from these hills, first to feed industrial furnaces, then to warm the homes of our ancestors - no blame here, I’m sure if I had been around back then, I would have done exactly the same…… but knowing what we know now, we must take another look at our landscapes.

I become positively enthusiastic about the initiatives to restore landscape diversity, and this is why, despite the gloom of climate change, I continue to produce those cheerful (bucolic?) landscape paintings - to serve as a reminder to the viewer that the world we can still enjoy is worth our effort to ensure that future generations will be able to derive even greater pleasure.

I try to be open to advice and guidance as an ‘emerging’ artist, and it is amazing just how often that boils down to one phrase: “You must find your voice…..”, or “Know what you want to say ….”

OK, I know that I tend toward being a pedant, but really?

I produce paintings. I put paint on canvas.

Where exactly does my ‘voice’ come into this?
I do not sing (a good thing too), I do not speak - what on earth has my voice got to do with anything?

Yeah, I know this is a metaphor, but it is now so overused, it is given out as the answer anytime an aspiring artist seeks guidance, and so often those giving it out have no ideas about how to follow through.
My paintings cover many different subjects - does that mean I have not ‘found’ my ‘voice’?
Or is this another symptom of the way the world has become shouty? 
Yes, I am seriously worried about climate change, and yes, I despair about what we do to the landscape that I paint.
But my personality is bright and cheerful, optimistic. I am a pragmatist. I find a way of dealing with whatever, so I actually find it difficult, impossible, to paint dark and gloomy pictures. I have tried. (Some go with this piece, below)
I argue that just as a professional musician must be able to play a dark and sombre lament then move on to a lively waltz, then on to something else, so an artist ought to be able to paint pictures in different styles to evoke different reactions. But I derive no pleasure from ‘dark and gloomy’ - maybe that is the point - I want to enjoy what I do and I want to produce paintings that other people will enjoy looking at.
Does this mean that despite my protestations, I HAVE ‘found my voice’?
Lively. Colourful. Interesting.
I have great respect for artists who are capable of producing work which is a very close replica of the reality they see in front of them and indeed that is where I began, but over time, with growing confidence and the years of practice, my work is moving, evolving, and is now somewhere west of expressionist, but is still south of abstract - proving the point that the ‘voice’ metaphor gets mixed up with the ‘journey’!
I am also puzzled as to why these words matter - shurely you, the viewers of art, look at the pictures in front of you, as I do with Turner, Cezanne, van Gogh - and the others.  When he died, Turner left over 30,000 watercolours to the nation - were there 100 word descriptions of each of them?

The ancient Greek philosophers provide an answer: “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom” - which would mean that all this stuff about voices and journeys is actually aimed at helping me, the artist, to realise what I am striving for and to put that into my paintings. 
Off I go then, into the studio ……..

A selection of paintings which should each tell a story.
Alun at Lower Navigation Colliery, now derelict, told me he served his apprenticeship there.
And ‘Home Alone 2021’ needs no more commentrary.
Cwm Sere Cottage - derelict old homes which are scattered around the hills always raise questions - who lived there? What was life like for them in that place? Did their hopes die ?