When I met Judy Buxton in the spring, she had just discovered a new location. For most landscape painters, discoveries of this sort tend to involve travel. But Buxton’s new horizon – the walk from Predannack to Kynance – is right on her doorstep, a few miles from her regular painting spots near her home on Cornwall’s Lizard Peninsula: Goonhilly Downs, the coves and inlets of Poltesco and the Helford River. The Roman philosopher Seneca once observed that travel changes nothing, since we take ourselves with us – Buxton’s practice as a painter confirms this view.

True, Cornwall is a long way from Buxton’s birthplace in Sydney, Australia. But it was the Cornish landscape that made her a painter, when she came over to the UK in her 20s, lost her passport and, finding herself at an emotional loose end, returned to her childhood passion – drawing. As her paint-spattered overalls testify, she remains impulsive. “It’s a very fluid process,” she says, “always changing, always wet, very drippy, fast and noisy: very physical. I’m not painting topographically - it’s more elemental.”

Because the elements are the real protagonists of her pictures, she eschews the traditional ‘landscape’ format in favour of an off-square box, in which the elemental clash of earth, air and water can be contained and dramatically focused on the horizon. Although her painting is ‘alla prima’, she is not an impressionist, being less concerned with surface illusion than depth. Her seas are heavy, and even her air is not light; like her water, it’s a physical agent for change, carving out the landscape before our eyes. “The big landscapes are about space, weight: sky-sea, sky-land,” she says. “The river subjects are more Eastern, really – more internal. The reflections cause you to reflect yourself.”

The smaller landscapes are painted on boards outdoors; the bigger ones on canvas in the studio using the smaller ones, plus watercolour sketches for reference. She doesn't use photographs as the camera doesn't select. “Painting from photographs makes everything even. I’m all to do with light, and light isn’t even.”

The light in Buxton’s paintings is eloquent. It tells you the season, takes the temperature of the day and registers the wind speed, from light to gusting. Into the accumulated smears, slaps, scoops and drips of paint Buxton miraculously mixes the weather, in the same subliminal way as she spirits the swoop of a bird or the loom of a boat hull into a picture without you noticing. Hunkered down with her paints in the landscape, she distils the experience of all her senses: the crunch of shingle, the squelch of seaweed, the sting of sand on the wind, the slipperiness of wet rock, the tang of salt, the spring of moorland scrub, the buzz of insects. Marcel Duchamp bottled the Air of Paris in a glass phial, but Buxton traps the Cornish salt-laden breeze on canvas, and it remains as fresh as the day it was painted. Like her changing experience of the landscape - “every time you go its different” – her images are never quite fixed, even when framed. Like Heraclitus’s river, you can never step into the same Buxton painting twice.

Laura Gascoigne, May 2009