Painting the Wild: Rebecca Howard’s ‘A Year in the Wild’
Congratulations to artist Rebecca Howard on the opening of her solo exhibition ‘A Year in the Wild’ at Knepp this week.
Over two years, Rebecca visited 9 rewilding projects across Britain, spending time painting the diverse landscapes she encountered. From wetlands and saltmarshes to woodland and ancient rainforest, each painting captures something of a landscape in the process of changing. The result is A Year in the Wild, a beautiful and thoughtful collection capturing the quiet drama of places in transition, where new life is taking hold and old patterns are beginning to shift.
Proceeds from the sale of Rebecca’s rewilding series, £5 from every print sale and 40p from every card sale, will be donated to pioneering rewilding charity Rewilding Britain, supporting wilder nature recovery across the UK. Buy prints on Rebecca’s website.
‘Water is the Key’ Rebecca’s painting of the beaver wetland at Wild Hamatethy.
In 2025, Rebecca visited Hamatethy to walk, observe, and paint. Water is the Key, grew from her time here. The work captures something that photographs can sometimes struggle to convey: the feeling of a place in transition – trees, water, wildlife, decay, and regeneration are all part of the same story.
In the Guardian article about the series, Rebecca explains that it was a beech tree that caught her attention. Much of its trunk had been gnawed by our resident beavers, yet the tree was still standing. It was, as Rebecca described it, caught somewhere between living and dead – a tree waiting to fall, but already becoming part of the habitat around it. Once it comes down, the deadwood will continue to support life in ways that are easy to overlook. For Rebecca, there was beauty in that uncertainty, in the knowledge that the landscape was still changing and that the tree’s story was not yet finished.
Rebecca’s immersive paintings invite us to look at things differently. A fallen tree is no longer simply a fallen tree. A muddy pool becomes part of a much bigger story. A patch of scrub, a changing stream, or a rotting branch can all tell us something about what is happening across the landscape. Her work doesn’t try to make rewilding look neat. Instead, it finds beauty in the mess and the constant movement of a recovering landscape.
Art can help us see a landscape differently. Rewilding asks us to let that landscape change. Here’s to both!
We look forward to seeing where the project takes Rebecca next.
You can buy prints on Rebecca’s website and support charity Rewilding Britain, here.
Words: Millie Burdett and Hannah Morley.
