Wendy McBride’s atmospheric pastel paintings depict her favourite southwest landmarks. However, they might not be places that you know. In fact, there’s a good chance you won’t know them at all.

Wendy, a poet at heart, enjoys walking, searching for wild places, to paint scenes where people don’t go. Perhaps this need for solitude comes from her living for 25 years on rural Dartmoor. Wendy likes to have time and space to contemplate her surroundings.

She scribbles and sketches and takes notes and then, later, alone in the studio, sees what comes back to her. “My memory and imagination play on those moments that have stuck in my mind, explains Wendy. “The whole procedure becomes overlaid with misremembering and sometimes, hopefully, happy accidents occur with the materials and the picture can take form and become my own creation.“

Wendy’s paintings are hard to define, they are not quite abstraction, impressionism, or expressionism. Light is very important to her. And what she observes as a very English thing: blurred horizons, when the land or sea melds with the sky in the distance.

The advantage of using soft pastels is that they aid and abet her desire for vagueness and soft edges. When she can’t paint she likes to read or write poetry, where certain phrases can inspire a painting.

Although Wendy has painted all her life, she came late to formal training, completing her Fine Arts degree after her children had grown up. Now a Devonian of 40 plus years she enjoys travelling and painting in Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, where she also exhibits.

White Space Art has exhibited Wendy’s paintings for over ten years and is delighted to host a solo show of her work.