In this visionary landscape, Diana Neale channels the mystical tradition that flows from William Blake through Graham Sutherland, John Piper, and Peter Lanyon, artists who saw landscape as a repository of ancient energies and forgotten pathways. The serpentine shapes winding through her painted terrain evoke Alfred Watkins' Old Straight Track, those mysterious alignments where 'beacon hills, mounds, earthworks, moats and old churches built on pagan sites seemed to fall in straight lines.'

Like Sutherland's Pembrokeshire metamorphoses, where natural forms become 'explorations of the relationship between human existence and the land,' Neale's Portal vibrates with what Lanyon called 'the fascination with points of conjunction and distinction', places where seen and unseen worlds collide. The dark conduits threading through chalk downs recall both Piper's wartime landscapes and Blake's conviction that 'England's mountains green' held spiritual significance beyond the visible. Here are the ley lines reimagined as contemporary psychogeography, where Neale's mixed media technique, those mysterious striations and luminous passages, create what Sutherland termed 'the intellectual and emotional essence of a place.'

The painting itself becomes a portal, a threshold between the mundane Wessex countryside and Blake's eternal Albion, where ancient trackways still pulse beneath tarmac and the 'old straight track' of ancestral memory cuts through time like dark rivers carrying the dreams of vanished peoples toward an unknowable, luminous horizon. As you stand before this work, you become an active participant in reimagining these ley lines, exploring ancient energies and forgotten pathways.