David Raine is a multi-award-winning landscape artist living and working in Cumbria. After spending thirteen years teaching Art and running a busy Art department in a Peterborough Secondary School, he left education in late 2020 to move to the North West, to give more time for his family and have the freedom to focus on painting the Lake District.

In pursuit of my current body of Art, I have two driving passions. The first is the sheer delight of the creative process: working the paint on the canvas, mixing hues, shades and colours, placing them alongside each other, making marks on paper, drawing lines and contours and blending tones. All this to create an object that echoes something of the beauty in the world and that, in turn, becomes inherently beautiful.

Second is the joy I experience in appreciating beauty in the natural world, particularly in the landscape of the English Lake District. My love of nature is rooted in my strong Christian faith. I believe God created remarkable beauty in the world to display his glory and goodness, and as a gift for humanity to enjoy. We see aspects of his grace, glory, and goodness, all around us, especially in the parts of the world like the Lake District, that remain beautifully unblemished. I am captivated with the remarkable characteristics of these landscapes, delighting in the plethora of textures and rich colours of the landscape in all its seasons. The glassy reflective nature of a still lake, the smooth ripples and rough waves, the unique textures of trees, bushes, and gorse, the rough, blocky, boulders, the rocks, and cliffs, and the grandeur of the forms and lines of mountains.

Enjoyment of a pursuit often finds its fulfilment in sharing the experience. I have sought to celebrate the splendour of the landscape in my drawings and paintings, shared through this exhibition. I aim to capture and convey in these works something of the essence of the enjoyment of my time spent in the lakes and mountains.