Annabel Gault works out of doors on prepared paper, conveying with astonishing directness the experience of standing in a landscape. She handles oil paint with an assurance and a delight in the medium. She works fast and fuses into a coherent whole the conventions of the sketch and of the finished oil painting.

This way of working is so close to one's image of what an artist should do, that it is worth stopping for a moment to consider what it entails. Is spontaneity so lightly achieved? Is experiencing the spray and the wind all that is required to be able to convey it in paint? The question answers itself. Most of us have known the exhilaration of absorbing an unforgettable place and moment - we've all had our easels blown over - but have known too the disappointment of realising what an inadequate transcript we bring home with us.

There is some deeper calculation going on in Gault's work. She realises that our perception of landscape is not a simple matter of the eye. We feel that the sea is cold and the stones hard. Her paintings seem to involve picking up objects rather than just depicting them. Her thick tactile oil paint seems to condense into slabs of glistening slate or mounds of damp moss, which are almost to be collected and arranged on the surface, like Gainsborough's landscape models. The lean of the rock fissures on the west coast of Ireland are even strangely reminiscent of old books on the shelf of the local pub.

The experience of real landscape always involves a sort of sublime frustration - the beauty or power of a scene has the effect of expanding the ambition of our imagination and yet at the same time we start to mind that the vivid distances are out of reach. Shakespeare's power-hungry Richard III expresses exactly this God-like craving:

Why then I do but dream on sovereignty,
Like one that stands upon a promontory
And spies a far-off shore where he would tread,
Wishing his foot were equal with his eye,
And chides the sea that sunders him from thence,
Saying, he'll lade it dry to have his way:
(Henry VI, Part 3, Act 3, scene 2, ll. 135-9)

All landscape painting has the effect of bringing such distances within reach, but in Gault's work there is a conscious celebration of this effect which makes the hand 'equal with the eye'.

None of these things have anything to do with light - you don't need light to touch a thing. Gault's paintings have a preponderance of dark, expressing the cold, wet and heavy of nature. These elements are heaped up almost to the upper limit of the frame. But she then sets the light at odds with the earth - forcing its way through in the upper margins and almost prizing open the wet-stone-wall of her surfaces. There is a power and an excitement in the way that light breaks through and in the way that our eye too pushes past the obstruction of the immediate foreground. There is a kind of struggle between near and far, between opaque and translucent and between solid and diffuse. These are pictorial elements which are used in a very subtle way in order to find some equivalent of the drama of a real scene. The drama of nature lies in change - something beyond the scope of a single painting to convey; instead Gault suggests this drama by series of paintings, depicting the same scene, and by evoking the idea of natural forces set against one other, their struggle held in a delicate balance.

There are other ways in which we feel rather than merely observing landscape: we tend to imbue the forms of nature, as well as the progress of a day, with some drama or significance. Familiar forms become personalised. Hamlet noticed that a cloud was 'backed like a whale' - we have all had similar experiences without being (or pretending to be) mad. The silhouette of a tree or the slope of a hill takes on a character, even though it may not look like anything as obvious as a man with a dog. Folklore gives us natural forms (usually rocks) which have acquired names and myths - The Giant's Causeway, the Devil's Chimney, the Lorelei. Gault's landscapes have this personal immanence, with fossilised monsters and a mythology of forms which deserve a name.

There is clearly in Gault's art a legacy of abstraction. This is abstraction as a language rather than as a trick of 'distressing' observation. She uses elements which have analogies with observed nature - near, far, light and dark - with a freedom and power which is purely painterly. This means that there is a parallel relation between the painting and the experience, which it so vividly conveys. The result has so much directness and such atmosphere that it's appeal is instant and entirely sensual.

Desmond Shawe-Taylor
Director - Dulwich Picture Gallery
April 2004