Heating Up

Acrylic on board · 61 x 47.7cm (77 x 62cm framed) · deep white frame

Stand at the edge of a geothermal park and you feel it before you see it: the heat rising through your feet, the hiss of steam, the smell of sulphur, the ground itself alive and restless. Rachel wanted to capture that raw, elemental energy, the sense of a landscape still being made.

The result is a painting that practically glows. A molten ribbon of orange cuts across the surface like lava forcing its way through the earth. Above it, the colours burn: flame red, burnt orange, ochre and gold, cracking and swirling like a fire at full heat. Below, the land erupts into life in emerald, jade and electric lime, bubbling into a lacy, cell-like texture that could be sulphuric mineral pools, steam vents or new growth breaking through scorched ground.

The paint was poured, so the colours found their own paths, merging, splitting and pooling just as they would in nature. When paint pouring became a popular craze, Rachel decided she needed to learn it, but not to become a one-trick "pouring artist". Trained in classical drawing and painting at Falmouth School of Art, she saw it as a new way of making marks: another tool to use alongside the brush and the pencil. Here, the pour gives her something no brush could, the unpredictable, living movement of a landscape that's still on the boil.

This is not a quiet painting. It's for someone who wants their walls to have energy and a real sense of adventure. Set in a deep white frame that makes every colour blaze, it would bring warmth and drama to a modern living space, a study, or a dark corner that needs lighting up.