Dick Vincent (2/5)

For my second post I thought I’d talk about my love of the outdoors and how it’s influenced my work. I graduated university way back in 2006 and didn’t really know what to do with my art work or where I saw it heading, at the time I was living in the centre of Manchester and lost contact with the outdoors and started to feel closed by the cities surroundings, so in an attempt to break away I started getting the train out to the countryside for small walks through the hills and forests (the north of England is an incredibly beautiful place and it can be easy to forget how breathtakingly diverse our landscape is), over time small walks turned into bigger walks and I began to get totally addicted by the outdoors, each hike felt as though I was piecing myself back together and rediscovering an almost forgotten passion.

During my hikes, I always document things I’ve seen and tried to learn the names of all the plants and birds I came across and after every hike I’d come home and draw something from memory which I would then post up onto my Instagram, the more I posted the more recognition I got and I’d finally felt as though I had the artist voice I was longing for. In a sense hiking saved my life, originally it started as something to get away from everyday city living but eventually became the major theme within my art and the building blocks of my career.

If you want to read more about Dick Vincent, you can have a look on his personal blog.