Beneath heavy skies, Lee Madgwick paints the English countryside as if caught in a quiet dream. His Norfolk landscapes stretch flat and green, anchored by lone brick buildings whose walls crumble, hover, or drift apart. Each scene feels frozen in an uneasy calm.
In Drift, bricks peel away from a box-like house and rise slowly into the air. Fracture lifts a tower block off the ground, its lower floors dissolving into dust. Madgwick turns neglected corners of rural Britain into stage sets of suspense—what he calls “an undercurrent of mischievous menace.”
His paintings balance dread and dark humor. In “Echoes,” half a house seems to have been washed away by a vanished flood, yet a bright waterslide remains intact, comically descending from the ruined second floor. People never appear directly in these scenes, though their traces persist—graffiti on concrete walls, curtains drawn against the storm, or faint reflections in windows.
Madgwick’s works evoke the psychological charge of abandonment and memory.
“I continue to portray that mysterious and melancholic otherworldliness of seemingly long-abandoned and isolated buildings under heavy skies,” he told Colossal.
The artist’s latest series will be on view at Brian Sinfield Gallery in Burford, Oxfordshire, from October 18 to November 4. More of his paintings can be seen on Lee Madgwick’s website.
