Malton artist Andy Black creates Conceptual Forest at Ryedale Folk Museum, Hutton-le-Hole

The Malton artist creates his timeless works through the slow, fastidious repetition of motifs such as trees, and his new show in the museum’s gallery combines his sculptural installation with a group of drawings from his on-going series.

“My drawings use a limited and consistent number of elements – trees, in the main, sometimes with paths, clearings, mountains or the surface of the ground itself as secondary motifs,” says Andy, who studied at the Royal College of Art.

“The drawings, which develop through small-scale studies to larger final works, navigate a territory between the constructed landscapes of Brueghel, the formal aesthetics of Ellsworth Kelly and Capability Brown’s controlled parkland.”

Gallery manager Andy Dalton seeks to place Black’s work in context. “Landscape has provided the subject matter for a great tradition in British art and many of its greatest images have become icons of national identity,” he says.

“Beside the works of traditional artists, modern and contemporary artists such as Barbara Hepworth, Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy have all used landscape as the subject, or object, of their work, and in recent years we’ve become more and more familiar with this approach to representations of ‘place’.

“Andy Black’s drawings play with our familiarity with the images of landscape and present imaginary places, which are the product of his research into the fundamental forms of the landscape.

“He has identified a series of elements that he sees as being the building blocks of landscape and from these has produced an ongoing series of drawings that explore the permutations of these archetypal forms.”

Conceptual Forest has been funded by the Arts Council and will be on show until September 19 as part of a series of four shows designed to highlight the best contemporary artists in Ryedale.

Admission to the gallery is free; opening times are 10am to 4.30pm daily.