The Silent Homecoming
©Kevin Redmayne, The Homecoming, 2024
This painting is one of the most technically accomplished pieces of artwork I’ve ever created, the fruition of around ten years of painting on and off. Across this decade, I haven’t painted with much continuity or consistency, and because of the natural rhythms of life, my output has been sporadic. Until now, painting has been something I’ve done for pleasure more than anything else, but I’ve reached a point where I feel I can begin selling my work. This marks a milestone in my journey as an artist.
For this piece, which I have provisionally titled The Homecoming, I have tried to capture the moody, ethereal silence and stillness of the English countryside, perhaps Yorkshire. I wanted to evoke the melancholic solitude of a lone rider making his way home—to a house that may no longer hold warmth or life. A recurring theme in all my paintings is this ethereal quality, where the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural seem to bend and blend. I’m drawn to images of isolation: a single tree, a misty mountain, an abandoned farmstead. And in this painting, it is the solitary figure on horseback who embodies that sense of haunting loneliness.
This is not something I have consciously designed. It’s something I gravitate towards. It reflects something of who I am as a person. Like Caspar David Friedrich, the great Romantic artist best known for Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, I seek to create landscapes that possess a sense of awe and mystery—paintings that suggest there is something more behind the veil of the visible world. Many of Friedrich’s works, my own, contain solitary figures, either overawed by nature or seemingly in command of it. I think that the same push and pull between man and landscape exists in this painting as well.
The Anatomy of the Painting
I wish I could say that I have a defined artistic process and that I follow a clear technique with absolute precision. But the truth is, I am self-taught. Each painting is a new adventure, with detours, missteps, and discoveries, which arise before the final destination. I likely use techniques that I don’t even know the names of. I work instinctively and intuitively.
The first part of the painting involved laying down the base colors. I blocked in the road, the fields, and then the clouds. The sky was particularly difficult. Pastel paper has a tooth to it. If it becomes oversaturated, the surface can no longer hold the pigment properly, leading to a bitty, overworked effect. While a painting might look good from a distance, up close it can become a mess. Over time, I’ve learned to understand the tactile feel of the paper. To know when it can yield, and when it’s reached its limit. This is important for the composition to have unity.
Pastels also have their idiosyncrasies. Lighter colours tend to be softer, while darker pigments are harder and more stubborn. In this painting, I began with blues, pinks, and greys, gradually building up layer by layer. The closer one gets to the horizon, the brighter the sky becomes, and so I introduced deep yellows and warmer tones at the base of the clouds. I wanted the sky to have an almost otherworldly quality—suggestive of a coming storm, but also something more intangible.
After that, I began layering the landscape. At first, I made the painting too light. I feared that otherwise, the final result would be too dark—a problem I’ve encountered before. But I quickly realised that the brightness didn’t align with the mood I was trying to achieve. The colours felt whimsical rather than weighty. Consequently, I muted them with black pastel, deepening the shadows and bringing the painting into balance.
The trees - which form important elements of the painting, particularly in showing distance - were delineated using sharp corners of black pastel, and I used a scumbling technique to achieve foliage. The hills, both in and outside, of the boundary wall were achieved through a blend of earthy greens and yellows, while the dried grass was built up with shades of red and ochre. In the foreground, I used individual strokes to define the strands of grass, adding texture and depth. Here the colours went all the way up to white.
The Cottage
The cottage was another extremely difficult aspect of the painting because of the fine granular detail required. Working with pastels, even chalk pastels, presents a challenge when it comes to achieving precision and rendering the architecture in a way that felt both realistic and painterly was a balancing act.
Originally, when I coloured the cottage, it was too light. I had initially envisioned something akin to the warm tones of Cotswold stone, but quickly realised it blended too much into the surrounding environment. I then shifted towards a base light grey, but again, it lacked presence and definition. My next approach was to darken it considerably, making it a very deep grey—but when I stepped back from the painting, I found that it looked too blocky. The structure was defined, but it lacked subtlety and had the unfortunate effect of resembling concrete slabs rather than a lived-in home.
The final version of the cottage, as it appears now, is the result of careful layering. I scraped the hard edge of a white chalk pastel over the grey, introducing highlights and a sense of texture. Then I repeated the process with yellow, red, blue, and black pastels, stippling as needed. Gradually the interplay of light and shadow revealed itself. I refined the lines, adjusting the contours of the roof, windows, and doorways to create an organic sense of depth. A final layer of light was added, subtly shifting its direction so that it catches more prominently on the right side than the left—an intentional effect to suggest the play of light across the scene.
Yet despite all this effort, the cottage itself does not feel like a place of life. There are no livestock in the fields. No dog waiting at the gate. No wife, no children, no birds in the sky. It is not a home in the traditional sense—it is an absence of home, a structure that suggests habitation but remains hauntingly empty. In many ways, it reflects the larger composition of the painting itself: a desolate, windswept landscape, steeped in solitude.
The idea of Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights
It was at the point of drawing the rider that I started toying with ideas. Who was this lone figure? Why were they making their way back to the cottage? And because my entire life has revolved around a love of literature, my mind instantly gravitated to some of the books that have shaped me.
In this case, Wuthering Heights came to mind. I imagined Heathcliff returning—not as the boy who had been cast out, but as the man who had learned the airs and graces of high society, only to discard them in his pursuit of vengeance. I saw him riding back to punish Hindley, now broken and drunk in the ruined house. Or perhaps it was a different moment—Heathcliff returning after Catherine’s death, his presence haunted by the ghost of his lost love.
There’s a passage at the end of Wuthering Heights that always touched me. It renders Heathcliff—who for much of the novel is monstrous—utterly human. It reveals him not as a villain, but as a man lost in grief, incapable of living in a world without Catherine:
“…and the whole world is a dreadful memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her.”
And that’s what I see when I look at this painting. Heathcliff returning to Wuthering Heights. To a world that perhaps no longer has much meaning for him. To a landscape of silence and memory, waiting to be taken up into the imposing clouds above his head, which smother the landscape—to be reunited with his childhood sweetheart.
Final Thoughts
This painting represents a significant turning point in my artistic journey—not just because of its technical execution, but because of the way it brings together so many of the themes I have been drawn to over the years. It embodies the Romantic tradition that has shaped me, the interplay between landscape and human solitude, and the delicate tension between presence and absence.
It is also the first painting I have created with the serious intent of selling my work. That, too, is a milestone. While I have spent years painting for pleasure, I now feel that my work is at a level where it can be shared more widely.
As I step into this new phase, I look forward to exploring more themes, refining my techniques, and continuing to tell stories through my paintings—stories of solitude, of memory, and of the landscapes that shape us.