Dominic Shepherd’s painting technique has been described as “psychedelic, acid-tab styling.” His settings are ambiguous, often set in forests, comprising an ethereal, folklore vision of England that might be past, present, or future. His works tend to eschew modern technologies and here in Back to the Garden, the ancient tools of gated fence and scythe are instead in evidence. His work examines myth-making, magic, and alternative narratives.

The paintings depict real scenes, but they also resonate on an emotional register of art, history, mythology, religion, and literature, speaking to dreams, memory and intimate lives, particularly family life. Here, in Back to the Garden, we see a blonde woman in a blue dress holding a scythe to the sky. In the distance behind her a swirling, light-tinged sky centers on a stand of trees in the far distance.

It is impossible not to think of our first parents, Adam and Eve, and their careful maintenance of Eden before their fall. One also might think of Shakespeare and his patriotic rousing in Richard II: “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” As Gavin Parkinson writes:

“His rejection of materialist progressivism and embrace of cyclical time and ritual gives onto an iconography of people involved in seasonal chores and bucolic undertakings in Shepherd’s paintings: ‘chopping wood, harvesting, riding horses, burning effigies, hanging out at festivals’ as he says. Beyond this, the collapse of linear time…allows encounters between Guy Fawkes and the Incredible String Band, Romantic poets and Morris Dancers, witches and hippies, William Blake and Pearly Kings and Queens, the New Model Army and the radical movements of the sixties, and, well, Levellers and the Levellers, at a metaphorical banquet or feast; or perhaps, better, a festival, in which the first and last of England meet in the imagination.”

Shepherd received his BA (hons) and MA from the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. He is an associate professor with the Arts University Bournemouth and has shown internationally in London, Frankfurt, Munich, and Miami. His work is held in private collections globally in Private Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.