Drawn deeply into the landscapes of Deeside and the Cairngorms, Maria Burton explores the powerful relationship between place, memory, and lived experience. Inspired by Nan Shepherd’s 
The Living Mountain, her practice captures the shifting light, weather, colour, and atmosphere of the landscape through painting.

“This temporary obsession with Deeside, I know, will become a permanent part of being, of memory.

The Living Mountain sparked an insatiable curiosity in me for the Cairngorms and Deeside. What emerged was a physical and imaginative continuity between the place, my own experience of it, and Shepherd's words - which too were born of being here.

Many of us have stood and looked into the water, into  immeasurable depths of such clarity and colour. It is  mesmerising, at times breathtaking. The mountains catch cloud, light and atmosphere with ever-moving energy: menacing crags and ochre, more benign slopes, linking valleys to enthralling skies.

Through painting, I explore lived experience with the viewer - encounters with time and weather, and an abstraction that moves beyond description; a translation of the awakening of the senses.

One step is only the start. One painting is never enough I observe, sketch, write, and then memory joins the adventure in the studio. The water, the mountains, the space, nor we, are ever the same. I am completely fascinated and immersed in place and painting. 

Deeside and the Cairngorms have my heart.

Thank you, Nan Shepherd”