The English painter Graham Hillier has built a national reputation over the past twenty years through his large-scale landscapes with their typically serene and spiritual mood.

Characteristically his paintings contain a high level of detail and often make use of powerful and dramatic natural light. He has exhibited widely in Great Britain and in France, and has held nine successful one-man exhibitions in central London Galleries.

Graham Hillier's paintings usually focus on landscape subjects found in Great Britain, Italy, France and Spain. His work often alludes to a journey, either real or supposed, on which we, the viewers, are asked to take the first step. Some of the areas to which he regularly returns include Wiltshire and the Ridgeway, the Norfolk and Suffolk coastlines, the Wolds and Moors of his native Yorkshire, and the elegant regions close to Pienza and Montepulciano in Southern Tuscany.

'My first steps on the Ridgeway were at Ashbury, heading towards Wayland's Smithy and Uffington Castle. It was June and very hot. The path stretched ahead, bright white in the heat of the summer sun and sheltered by tall hawthorn hedges with wide expanses of flatlands to the north, rolling downs to the south and silence on the Ridgeway itself.

The pathway has a magnetic pull. Echoes of the past were all around, but always there is the pathway ahead, continually inviting and beckoning this not very gifted walker onwards towards hills, trees, stones and the ancient hill fortresses, those huge man-made sculptures which appear to grow out of the surrounding downs.

Dawn is my favourite time when the night gives way to the power of the sun, and there is a unique and potent stillness as the land, the sky and even the sheep are waking. It was at dawn on a chill November morning that I first saw the stone circle at Avebury, alone and silent, surrounded by mystery.'  Graham Hillier