Landscape photographer Joe Cornish and artist Kane Cunningham command national and international interest. Their new exhibition opening next week promises to reinstate the significance of the landscape. Jo Hughes reports.

JOE CORNISH and Kane Cunningham have been friends for years. They share a love of the local landscape and interest in the social politics of our land, as well as a fascination with art.

Now, for the first time, a new exhibition brings their works together to sit alongside other great British landscape artists.

On the surface it appears that opposites attract – the clear, precise Joe Cornish photographs sit coolly beside Kane Cunningham’s wilder, dashing watercolours. Beneath the surface, however, the two share themes and aims.

Over the past two years, the Yorkshire-based artists have made large-scale paintings and photographs, inspired by their response to the historic landscapes collection at Scarborough Art Gallery.

The resulting exhibition, Landscape Revisited, promises some departures from the norm for Cornish and some exciting contemporary watercolours from Cunningham – the man most famous for turning a house that is falling into the sea into an ongoing, ever-changing work of art.

They hope to re-establish landscape, watercolour and photography as contemporary forces in British art.

The reflections in their work, they say, represent not only the changing light and forces of nature, but also mankind’s political and social history, the state of our land today and the lives within.

Both have spent years trawling the countryside hunting out their art, going to the wildest places in all weathers.

“In a way we are like hunter-gatherers,” says Kane. “Joe’s working with a snare, he sits there until he gets his prey… I’m out there beating the bushes, flushing out the prey, eventually something will happen.”

Which means, he says, while he is working hard, “running around like a madman, creating those moments that Joe is waiting for,” Joe is “the cool guy, he’s got his act together, sitting there sipping tea.” He laughs that even though Joe works with a digital camera, he will only take two shots in a day… sometimes one.

But they are both in pursuit of the same game. Kane, who runs the BA course in Fine Art at Yorkshire Coast College, says Joe approaches photography in the same way a painter approaches his paintings.

“Joe has walls with maps, he knows what he’s doing, he understands the light and space, he knows where it will fall at different times of day. Watching Joe is watching a master craftsman at his work, he considers the landscape as a painter would, and is conscious of what he can do to make a piece of art.”

For Joe, Kane has provided the stimulation he needed to “loosen up”.

“I started by going to quite a few of the actual places in the paintings,” he says. “As time has gone by I have loosened up, under immense pressure from Mr Cunningham… he is mischievous, he likes to question things.”

The two plan in future to work on a new approach of collaborations, cutting photographs and making collages with Kane’s paintings.

Joe says it is a risk for him, because the outcome is unknown. He has worked as a photographer for 30 years, which has led to success with his own gallery, books and a huge fan base.

But, he says, he’s at the stage in life where “if I don’t take risks now I never will. Taking risks is fundamental as an artist”.

He describes his work as being all about the flow of light. “There is an element of ideas – how you feel and how you want to see the world, but you let the light seduce you into it. I work in a rhythmic sort of way, and use the fluency of line and light and form to draw myself into the scene and thereby the viewer. It is a dance with light, light itself is ever-changing.”

Kane Cunningham is more impulsive and ebullient, strapping himself to his Landrover so he can paint stormy skies and losing his easel to stormy seas.

His starting point was “big skies, big seas, big landscapes, the glory, power and force of winter and autumn skies, the swirling maelstrom in a sky that has its own colours, shapes and forms”.

For him endless blue summer skies are “boring as hell”.

His medium for this exhibition is watercolour. “Watercolour is as valid as ever as contemporary medium. It is one of the hardest mediums to use. You have to be a draughtsperson. The watercolour artist has to be really brave. You have to hold your nerve, from the very first brushstrokes, because there is no return.”

He talks to as many farmers as he can; their memories going back over the years give another political insight into the landscape. For example, talking to a farmer who told him his memories of Halifax bombers going off from an airfield and dogfights in the sky, all in silhouette, filled the painting with a blood-red sky.

Using the stories he has heard and the history he knows about the space he is painting, he ‘attacks’ the paper with big bold brush strokes, angry, violent, very expressive marks he says are also part of his character, and this is what elicits the contemporary look.

“The way I understand the landscape is contemporary,” he says. “I am very much influenced by social, political, historical context, and highly informed about the space before painting it.

“I say to my students, what are you looking at? For example, a beautiful stone wall – that dry stone wall 150 years ago marked the beginning of social division. Understanding the landscape completely, you know how to paint it.”

• Landscape Revisited shows at Scarborough Art Gallery from October 1 to December 4.