Robert Youngson creates high-quality digital prints of contemporary landscapes, imbued with a feeling of mystery and presage. Laurence Quant creates short, distilled poems that enable the reader to visualise a wider poetic landscape. For a physical gallery space, the landscapes and prints of the poems will be made on a similar large scale, then framed and hung side by side. By placing pictures and poems together on the wall, connections between their romantic subjects and the two different media can be made. The works are designed to complement (not illustrate) one other. This relationship is further explored in an artists' book.

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Robert Youngson paints with the mouse, focusing on technology in the area where the computer delivers beyond predictable results (or beyond factory settings). It is here that the medium starts to reveal itself. Using the notions behind painting/mark making, certain areas of his works are left deliberately pixelated and damaged; this is in contrast to the other parts that appear to be glazed in oil. Youngson is not trying to imitate paint; instead he is exploring the digital medium‘s textural qualities. Therefore the pixels are not hidden but taken as an inherent quality of the medium. They are his brush marks.

The subtlety of light suggests an atmospheric range from shimmering sun to overcast, heavy weather. There is much to satisfy fans of the rolling skies in Dutch landscape prints or Constable sketches. Youngson is also highly influenced by the sweeping light and decisive palette of Turner.

Laurence Quant examines the visual nature of poetry. Aesthetically, his poems will gain a sense of freedom from being released from publishers’ constraints (such as those in pre-formatted anthologies). He creates fine art-poems specifically to be shown on the wall. He reworks and refines his verse until brevity is achieved allowing the reader instant access: big themes portrayed in simple, short lines. As with Imagist poets like Hilda Doolittle, this approach enables him to bring the idea of the sublime into his work, as narrow everyday landscapes often become wide expanses and events lasting millennia.

Youngson encompasses the sublime by creating tiny details within vast landscapes. In some pieces he uses familiar buildings as tiny reference points to place the viewer inside a wider expanse, in the same way as Caspar David Friederich would place a figure on a mountain or shoreline. In other works he lets the view reach the edges of the print without reference to scale making the image mysterious and captivating like a Vija Celmins outer space drawing. Standing back to take them in and studying details close up is always recommended!