The Claude Lorrain Experience – John Workman

About

Known for his meticulous and reflective glass works, Workman draws inspiration from the pastoral idealism of Claude Lorrain’s 17th-century landscapes, reimagining them as fragile constructs in an age of urban displacement and nostalgic longing.

Through a series of works rendered on glass, including Postcard, Phoenix, Landscape with Picnic, and Figure in Landscape (box), Workman evokes a spectral sense of scenery—part memory, part theatre. His landscapes are not depictions of reality but poetic fictions: fragments of an England glimpsed from train windows, of hedgerows and ruins preserved in time, and of vanished agrarian world filtered through art-historical dreams.

Born in Bedford, Workman reflects on how our first encounters with landscape are often mediated—by print, by painting, by cultural mythology. Just as Claude’s Italy was a stage set for contemplation, so too is the English countryside in Workman’s work: a site where reality and imagination merge. His approach is both playful and elegiac, a kind of quiet archaeology of the picturesque.

The Claude Lorrain Experience invites visitors to consider not just landscape, but how landscape is seen—how it is remembered, framed, and fictionalised. These glass panels, luminous and delicate, become windows into a vanished ideal, while subtly commenting on our longing to find coherence and beauty in the fragments left behind.

John Workman has exhibited extensively over the past 30 years, with a wide range of shows across the UK and internationally. Highlights include exhibitions at the respected Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art in London, Angel Row Gallery in Nottingham, and Michael Martin Gallery in San Francisco. More recently, his work has been presented by Virginia White at Clerkenwell Green, featured during Clerkenwell Design Week, and shown in the Milton Museum in Chalfont St Giles with his exhibition Miltonic Landscapes, reflecting his continued dialogue with English cultural and artistic traditions.