ABOUT

 

Francesca Salvini is a painter based in Yorkshire. Her work explores the shifting light, weather and atmosphere of the landscape around her.

Many of the paintings begin with walks across the Yorkshire Dales, where changing conditions — wind, cloud, and season — shape the colours and textures that appear in the work.

Working intuitively in layers of acrylic and mixed media, Salvini builds surfaces through gesture, mark and movement. The paintings move between observation and abstraction, capturing fleeting moments of place while leaving space for memory and feeling.

Alongside larger works, the Field Notes series records smaller observations gathered while walking through the landscape — fragments of colour, light and form that become part of an ongoing exploration of the Yorkshire environment.

Francesca Salvini works from her studio in Skipton, on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales.

August 25

What the landscape doesn’t show

I never try to paint what I see—only how it feels. The colours I reach for, the marks I make, are shaped by memory, movement, and mood. The landscape might offer a horizon, a shadow, or a shift in light—but I’m more interested in the atmosphere it leaves behind.

What stays with me isn’t the shape of a hill or the curve of a path. It’s the feeling of wind pressing against my back, the weight of a grey sky, the silence that settles just before rain. The view is just the starting point. What ends up on the canvas is something remembered, reimagined, and sometimes completely undone.

Read More

July 25

The chaos before the calm

People often ask if my studio is peaceful. Not always. There’s paper everywhere, brushes left in tea cups, and a floor that’s half covered in footprints and paint splatters. Most days, there’s at least one half-finished painting propped against the wall that I’m trying not to overthink.

But I’ve come to realise that the mess is part of it. The clutter, the chaos, the not-quite-knowing—it all plays a role. That’s where the looseness comes from. That’s where the unexpected happens. The magic doesn’t arrive when everything’s tidy. It shows up in the middle of it all.

Read More

June 25

Sketchbooks I never show

My sketchbooks are full of half-ideas—loose marks, quick colour tests, things that didn’t quite work but might lead somewhere else. They’re not made to be pretty. They’re rough, unfinished, and often messy, but that’s exactly why they matter.

This is where I try things out without pressure. Where accidents spark new directions. A torn edge, a scribbled note, a colour combination I’d never have planned—these are the seeds of future work. Sometimes what begins as a throwaway page becomes the start of a whole new painting.

Read More