‘Being’ in the Landscape with William Bickerstaff

Every day without fail, William Bickerstaff takes a walk. In 2020, this daily ritual was the catalyst to return William to his fine art origins, after 30 years working as a full-time graphic designer. Now, he creates artworks ranging from the length of an arm, to wall-spanning masterpieces dense with minute pen and ink detail. We join William in his studio, based in the gardens of an old Guildhall in the Cambridgeshire village of Linton, to learn more about his process and inspiration.

Many of William’s works feature the rural environment of Cambridgeshire and the surrounding areas, drawn from his copious walks with his dog, Lola. The uncertainty of his artistic life after leaving graphic design was managed by these walks, as William says he found himself “becoming more adventurous, going further afield into more remote areas off the path, and becoming more connected to the landscape I was in.” From here, he intensively documented the scene with photographs and within a few weeks, he’d done his first drawing. William describes how, “for me, the thing I realised I wanted to try and communicate was the intensity I felt being in the landscape. Nothing too highfalutin; quite simple, and yet intrinsically very powerful, spiritual and healing. And so all of the work over the years has really been about trying to communicate the intensity, the power, of that moment in that place.” The title of his upcoming exhibition with Cam Rivers Arts, That Moment, That Place, is a homage to this feeling.

Having had such a strong history in a slightly different form of art, we ask William how his career as a graphic designer might have influenced his artistic practice now. He first describes how he is drawn to images in very low light levels, and explains how his experience as a designer likely informs the way he deciphers images. Not only this, but also the process of remaking those images using layers of tone over each other. One might assume that the work of a designer is more precise than a fine artist, but William explains that, “my work as a fine artist is not messier than my work as a designer, it’s just a parallel type of precision that I do find really helpful.” The kind of structured approach favoured by graphic designers comes in very helpful with the kind of complex drawings that William often creates. “You’re often in [the artworks] so long that it can be a little bit like being in a very dark tunnel, and you really have to have a rope to hang onto to get through it. I think that some of those techniques and structures help me to plot my way through.” Seeing the precisely plotted diagrams of the tones of clouds in his studio certainly give some insight into how William’s artworks are constructed.

Because William’s work has such a strong emphasis on nature, we ask how the current conversations around animal welfare and climate change may have seeped into his work. William describes how since around the 15th century, people have been painting or drawing landscapes, once image-making began to move away from being a purely religious form. He describes how this is mimicked today in a new movement of ‘natural’ writing and image-making, led by such people as Robert Macfarlane, who is renowned for his eloquent writing about ‘being’ in the landscape. This is a core underpinning of William’s work, of ‘being’ in the landscape. William says, “even though it’s never a conscious move, there is a certain kind of zeitgeist about communicating the natural world in that way. Perhaps important also is that it now finds an audience willing to hear.” Because it is true, that however much one feels their own art themselves, it is fulfilling for audiences to be able to respond to that too. William then describes how some have interpreted his art through the lens of climate change. “I always mean my work to be unsettling in some way. It’s never meant to be inert, beautiful, or picturesque. In art, they call it the ‘sublime’ – a concept articulated in the 18th century about the power of nature, and how man is dwarfed by it.” Just looking at some of his works like View from Rivey Hill or Tree II, this powerful intensity certainly comes to the fore for the viewer. William agrees that this idea of nature being a terrifying and less benign force does somewhat resonate with some understandings of climate change, with human beings feeling “very small and overwhelmed in the face of the non-human world.”

We noticed that some of William’s works feature a fleeting presence of figures, houses or windows. They are particularly more stark given that so much of his work focuses exclusively on the remote, quiet landscape. When asked about these traces, William describes how you can often find yourself on an old and ancient way, like a Roman road for example, which has been used for hundreds or even thousands of years. He explains that, “particularly at dawn or dusk, allowing yourself to be sensitive to the memory of the people, animals, even spirits, that were on that track is a powerful and magical aspect of being there. As the day begins to fade and the people begin to exit the landscape, the idea that these memories suddenly start to reinhabit it feels very real.” This might seem like a difficult thing to convey through a static, often monochrome medium. But William found a way to do it through the medium of long exposure photography. These evocative photographs “revealed ephemeral, sometimes human or Bacon-like shapes of anything moving such as my dog, Lola. They seemed to me to be fragments of the past, fleeting, perhaps melancholy energies made visual, an avatar for the traces of people that had walked those paths before.” In this way, the photographs became a kind of filter for William, enabling him to see the landscape in an altogether different way. And it is these photographs that line his studio walls, allowing William to “explore another aspect of the power and magical quality that the landscape has at those moments.”

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William’s exhibition is open 3rd August – 31st August 2022

Open Tues, Weds & Thurs 12-5pm

Meet the artist in the gallery (Fri 12th/26th & Sat 13th/27th)

Address: Cam Rivers Arts, 33 Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1QY

Interview cover photo: (c) David Donnan @daviddcamb