About The Artist Landscape is my visual stimulus. I paint how I feel about being in it, affected by nature and the resonance of each place. My childhood was spent on the moors of northern England, where I developed a deep connection with the landscape - its openness and freedom – and this is what I paint.   From childhood our landscape heritage filled me with wonder and awe: I still feel that, alongside a need to draw attention to its fragility.  My work is intrinsically involved with depicting the wide open spaces of our landscapes, and how I feel when absorbed by them. I paint what I know, what I remember about an experience or series of experiences within a landscape. I absorb the place and the time, and then revisit it in my mind later, sometimes years later when the memories which are the strongest become the ones that define the painting and its mood.  Time transforms the memory into something richer and more individual. In my work I am constantly shifting between what is outer and what is inner.  I use the outer world as a means of giving form to and celebrating what goes on within, which at first I may not fully understand myself.  The landscape or experience evolves upon the canvas.  Often a battle, and always with tension, the painting is created ... and only when completed do I begin to understand from where it has come. John Fineran on... Heather Duncan at The Tregoning Gallery May 08 This score of oils, in high-pitched colour, is contemporary abstract painting at its most liberated. It celebrates the emotional appeal of colour and revels in the sensuousness of paint. The rich reds and blushing pinks sing, in many instances they are fielded within acres of cool, pearly blues or luminous turquoise-greens. Application is conspicuously various; here lush and generous, there sparse and lean. Titles intrigue. ‘Parting;’ ‘Leaving;’ ‘Homeland’ and ‘Love Boat Captain,’ suggest the yearnings of experience, or at least wistfulness; whilst ‘Tin Mine’ and ‘Stones’ appear, literally, more grounded. Whatever the subject or source, its personal meaning or resultant poetry, Duncan dextrously and intelligently exploits the very medium. Her vocabulary is wide and effective, especially the ability to lose and find edges or emphasise them with nervy or idly trailing lines; to abut ponderous masses one against the other and her persistent overpainting- boldly risking or maybe even inviting the perils of pentimenta – is admirable. Her antecedents could well be the luxuriant, vibrantly coloured abstracts of Nicholas de Stael and something of the fluent notations of Richard Diebenkorn but not in the derivative sense; rather more a personal discovery of similar plastic sensibilities and expressiveness for her own purposes. This is painting as process in all its affecting poetry, tactility, and unpredictability. The painting as subject - not painting of a subject – however poignant the title. Indeed, the painting might then be considered an object in itself – not least of mystery and conjecture.