Kane Cunningham's contemporary landscape paintings of the beautiful North

Northern Landscapes: Part One will be on display at Scarborough Art Gallery this autumn and will be the first in a series of shows at the venue culminating in a major open exhibition in late 2020.

Kane says: "My painting follows in the tradition of landscape painters such as JMW Turner, John Piper, Graham Sutherland and Peter Lanyon. However, my focus as a landscape painter is to reflect upon contemporary issues related to the environment, to climate change and the landscape as a contested space.

"My preferred medium is watercolour which links directly to Turner but also because it's a wonderful and expressive process of painting, particularly when out in the landscape. This much-maligned technique and medium offer the artist an opportunity to respond intuitively to the landscape and to risk everything in a moment's loss of concentration.

"This makes landscape painting exciting and just as valid as other contemporary subjects, if not more so as we recognise the need to protect the living planet in a world fighting over resources such as water, minerals, land and places to live."

Northern Landscapes Part One: Kane Cunningham is at Scarborough Art Gallery from Saturday 14 September 2019 until 5 January 2020.