Unquiet Landscapes 4 Unquiet Landscapes 5 Unquiet Landscapes When I was asked to curate a 'landscape exhibition' I considered how to underpin this beyond a summary of how contemporary painters approach landscape in their practices today, so it could become more an inquiry, of why the construct of 'landscape' still matters as a source and what this construct means to those who still choose to employ it both in spite of and because of the romanticism which wraps around it. At the time of being asked I was reading and rereading Christopher Neve's text whilst undertaking many journeys from the north to the southeast of England. Watching the unfolding of the British landscape where hills gave away to fens, to the spilling of brown fields on the outskirts of cities and the deep breath of London as the train pulled in only to be pulled sideways into the hop fields of Kent. An unravelling of estuaries and skies. Landscape which carries all the traces of history and our changing times beneath its fields and turning leaves. I first thought of the exhibition as a sort of epilogue or long awaited sequel, as though this consideration of landscape through the work of those Neve examines, could somehow foment landscape painters today in a clear and well beaten pathway. But as Neve points out: The characteristic of reality is that it is made-up of frozen moments (discrete time), perceived one after another […] But paintings represent one moment continually. That they are objects and not ideas is their strength and their limitation. (Neve 2020 [1990] p.24)