Downland is a unique collaboration celebrating the landscape of the North Wessex Downs as seen through the eyes of artist Anna Dillon and poet Jonathan Davidson. Featuring twenty paintings, this is the first extensive publication in book form of Anna Dillon’s vibrant and colourful work. The artworks are complemented by a series of poems from Jonathan Davidson, inspired both by the paintings and by the landscape. Taken together they form a kind of guidebook in paintings and poetry to the most popular stretch of The Ridgeway National Trail. The book includes a map pinpointing the locations that inspired the paintings and the poems.
We are very pleased to feature two of these remarkable painting and poem pairings here on East of The North.
Downland is published by Two Rivers Press and is available to purchase on their website:
Anna Dillon was born in the market town of Wallingford (then Berkshire) in 1972 and spent the first few years of her life in Wiltshire near Avebury before moving to South Oxfordshire where she still lives and works. Inspired by the ancient countryside of the British Isles she has been a professional artist since 2008 and has developed a vibrant signature style using bold and strong colour to reflect the form, contours and light of the land.
Jonathan Davidson was born in Oxford in 1964, and lived in Didcot, South Oxfordshire, from 1965 until the late 1980s. He is a widely published poet and writer, with a particular interest in how poetry is heard and in how poetry is experienced in the natural world. He lives in the English Midlands, but frequently returns to the Vale of the White Horse and the Berkshire Downs.
