'I'm not trying to capture a view, but the moment when the landscape shifts into feeling. The painting has to carry that memory in its own language.'
Louise Balaam NEAC RWA is a British painter known for expressive, light-centred landscape work that draws on direct experience of the natural world. Based in Kent, she trained at Canterbury before completing an MA in Fine Art, establishing a practice grounded in drawing outdoors and a highly physical engagement with oil paint. She was elected a member of the New English Art Club and an Academician of the Royal West of England Academy in 2011, recognition of her sustained contribution to contemporary landscape painting.
Balaam's paintings develop from a long-term engagement with the British landscape and the act of walking through it. Drawing outdoors is the starting point for almost everything she makes - quick, searching marks that record the structure of a place, the speed of weather, and the sensations that attach themselves to light at particular times of day.
These drawings are not templates but prompts. Back in the studio, she works from memory as much as observation, letting the painting unfold through layers of oil paint applied with broad, confident strokes and moments of scraped-back surface.
What matters to Balaam is the point where looking gives way to feeling: when a landscape stops being a scene and becomes an atmosphere, an echo, or a memory. She is interested in the tension between openness and solidity, between the grounded weight of land and the transient qualities of sky and weather.
The physicality of paint - its drag, its resistance, its capacity for accident - is central to how she searches for these sensations. Her paintings are built through this dialogue between gesture and recollection, resulting in works that are spacious, quietly resonant, and rooted in lived experience rather than literal description.