If you are looking for a thoughtful gift or a worthy addition to your own bookshelf, I have a recommendation for you. A Celebration of the South Downs National Park is a beautifully curated book of art in which local artist Gordon Rushmer draws together decades of close observation to honour the South Downs National Park in its full breadth. However, his accompanying writing carries equal weight.
One passage in particular stopped me in my tracks: “Where would the South Downs be without the Weald? Within the park the western Weald is an equal partner with the chalk hills to its south.”
I found myself smiling as I read these words. Not because they are poetic, but because I recognised they had been written by a kindred soul. Too often, the National Park is presented as a sweep of white chalk and open downland, yet the woodlands, pasture and clay soils of the Western Weald shape its character just as profoundly.
I first encountered Gordon’s work hanging in the homes of Margaret Paren and Robin Crane, the two leaders of the campaign to secure the Western Weald’s inclusion within the National Park boundary. His painting featured the view from Older Hill — not only a personal favourite of mine, but also a landscape that played a quiet, yet significant, role in shaping how decision-makers recognised our area’s value back in 2010 (do join my next Coombe with a View walk to learn more). It was therefore a particularly fitting thank you gift for these two indefatigable champions of the Western Weald.
Having read Gordon’s words about the Weald’s equal place within the National Park and knowing the significance of his painting of Older Hill, it was hardly surprising that long before we met, I sensed we would see eye to eye.
When we did eventually sit down to talk about the path that shaped his career, it was over a warm cup of coffee on a cold winter’s day. Gordon’s favourite kind of weather apparently. As his art demonstrates, he seeks stark light, stripped-back trees and hedgerows, and empty paths. He avoids the easy lure of summer greens, preferring instead a palette of earthy tones. He joked that perhaps he should have been born further North, where bleak moorland vistas would have been a year-round feature.
Instead, the Downs have been an almost constant companion throughout Gordon’s life: the backdrop to childhood in Petersfield, family life in Liss and later years in Plaistow, West Sussex. As a boy, he spent holidays cycling the length of what we now recognise as the National Park with his parents. Over time, he walked it, studied it and built a deep familiarity with its layered history and landscape. Field boundaries, ancient trackways, buildings, trees and underlying geology all inform his compositions.
I say “almost constant companion” because for eleven years Gordon stepped away from the Downs to work as an official war artist. In doing so, he followed in the footsteps of Eric Ravilious, another famous Downland artist whose career bridged landscape and conflict. Ravilious painted the chalk almost exclusively before travelling north to Norway during the Second World War. Gordon’s path differed in geography and scope. His work embraces both the chalk Downs and the wooded Weald, and his wartime journeys took him to Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea and Ethiopia with both British and Dutch forces. At sixteen, when he left school for art college, he could not have imagined that his career would involve handling weapons, driving military vehicles or operating within active conflict zones. Yet when the opportunity arose, he embraced it.
The contrast between military life and the usual rhythm of an artist’s practice could not have been sharper. Studio work often allows space for reflection, false starts and waiting for inspiration. Army life does not. It runs on hierarchy, discipline and clear chains of command. Gordon had to adapt to tight deadlines, restricted movement and high-risk environments where hesitation carried consequences. He worked as part of a unit rather than in isolation. At the same time, he carried the responsibility of recording not only operational detail but also the human dimension of conflict. That experience changed him. It sharpened his focus, strengthened his discipline and brought a new clarity to the way he now approaches the landscapes of the Downs and Weald.
Before we parted, our conversation turned to churches and to the question of whether painting buildings is easier than painting landscapes. With St Botolph’s Hardham, and its extraordinary frescoes, just down the road, it seemed the perfect place to continue our discussion.
Inside the small Norman church, Gordon talked me through the painstaking process the Lewes Group of monks would have used: lime plaster laid in sections, pigments applied while the surface was still wet, working against the clock before the wall dried. We traced scenes that have survived for nearly a thousand years — St George as well as an extraordinary image of a small dragon offering the apple to Eve. The clarity and confidence of the lines remain striking.
Gordon has, of course, painted Hardham — the church itself, the frescoes, and a poignant window through which winter light falls (the same window before which he stands in the top photo). There is something fitting about an artist painting the work of earlier artists, acknowledging continuity rather than competition. Although that particular painting appears in one of his earlier books, now out of print, the same depth of observation and respect for place runs throughout A Celebration of the South Downs National Park.
If you would like to explore his work for yourself, A Celebration of the South Downs National Park is currently available from Petworth Bookshop, One Tree Books in Petersfield and Steyning Bookshop. It makes a thoughtful gift, but it also rewards slow reading. Like the landscape it records, it reveals more the longer you look.
