What Is Nature-Inspired Abstract Art? How Coastal Storms Become Canvas

By Simon Kenny | 9 min read

Nature inspired abstract art translates the raw energy of natural forces into non-representational form on canvas. For me, this means carrying the physical sensation of Kentish coastal storms into the studio and releasing it through gestural mark-making, layered vivid colour and texture.

This is Part 2 of The Muse and the Meaning, a series of inspirations behind my abstract paintings. The first part explored the studio itself: the music, the productive chaos, the intuitive beginnings that start every canvas. Here I want to go back to where the impulse to paint begins. Out on the coast, in weather that calms or thrills me, I walk through the polarities of Britain’s seasons, called back to the canvas when an image or a feeling is revealed.

Why does nature inspire my abstract painting?

Nature gives me something immediate to paint: pressure, scale, kinetic energy, and the sensation of standing inside something vast. When I walk along the Kent coast in turbulent weather, my spirit is awoken, and this is exactly what carries me to the studio, and my brush to the canvas.

I have been taking these walks for years. The coast near where I live is exposed and blunt and, in winter, barely tolerable, which is precisely why it works. There is nothing picturesque about standing in horizontal rain watching the sea slowly creep in. The obvious beauty present in summer is stripped away, leaving the raw and intricate allure of a January landscape to come to the fore.

Sometimes I take photos of what I am looking at, but often I do not. Regardless, what I carry back to the studio is a state of agitation, a physical memory of force, weight, and sound. These are my materials. The things I summon into being when I pick up a palette knife.

What is the Sublime, and why does it matter to abstract painting?

The Sublime is the sensation of encountering something far larger than yourself and finding it beautiful rather than terrifying. Edmund Burke defined it in 1757 as producing ‘the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.’ For an abstract painter, the Sublime is useful precisely because abstraction can reproduce that feeling directly, without needing to depict its source.

Burke was talking about mountains, oceans, and storms. The experience he described is so vast that the ordinary pleasures of balance and harmony do not apply. Something else happens. The viewer is momentarily overwhelmed, and within that overwhelm there is, strangely, relief. The smallness of the self in the presence of something vast can feel like a release.

Abstract painting can produce that condition without showing the cliff or the wave. A surface of churned colour built through physical mark-making generates a comparable sense of scale and force. This is the territory lyrical abstraction shares with Abstract Expressionism: painting that carries a storm’s energy, not its image. Something in the painting acts on the viewer.

Claim: Edmund Burke first articulated the theory of the Sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), defining it as the sensation generated by experiences of vastness, obscurity, and uncontrolled natural power, producing ‘the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.’ His framework became foundational to Romantic-era painting, including the later work of J.M.W. Turner.
Source: Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, J. Dodsley, London, 1757.

How does Turner connect to nature-inspired abstraction in painting today?

J.M.W. Turner is the painter I return to most often. Not because I paint like him, but because he understood something I am working out myself: that atmospheric truth matters more than literal accuracy. Late Turner canvases, with their charged light and dissolved forms, came so close to abstraction that the distance between his work and mine feels navigable.

Turner sketched extensively outdoors, studying coastal conditions and storm light before translating them onto canvas. The Tate’s archive of Turner’s work reveals watercolour studies of radical economy, works that prioritise atmospheric charge over literal description. John Constable described Turner’s canvases as painted with ‘tinted steam.’ Turner represented the effect of the storm, not the storm itself.

What Turner discovered was that colour and gesture could carry emotional truth even when the image dissolved. His late Venetian studies and storm paintings preserved energy without a fixed form. That is the territory I work in too: painting where the sensation outlasts the subject, and the viewer brings as much to the canvas as the artist left in it.

Claim: The Tate holds the largest collection of Turner’s work in the world, including his late atmospheric studies. Tate curators describe these works as “pushing representation to its limits” through techniques including scraping, blotting, and layering translucent washes to capture light and atmospheric movement rather than literal scene.
Source: Tate Gallery, J.M.W. Turner collection notes and archive, tate.org.uk/art/artists/joseph-mallord-william-turner-558, accessed April 2026.

How do I physically translate coastal energy into abstract mark-making?

The translation from coast to canvas is physical before it is visual. I come back not with reference images but with a state of agitation. In the studio, a palette knife dragged hard across a loaded surface has more in common with a gale than any painted wave could. The action is the point as much as the result.

The palette knife does something a brush cannot; it creates its own logic. When I work with thick acrylic and Liquin Impasto to build sculptural weight, the surface resists and yields in ways I cannot plan. That unpredictability is my weather, its variable action guiding the texture and colour on the canvas through moments of spontaneity.

Scraping back layers reveals what accumulated underneath. Earlier marks, colours that were made and partially buried. I think of that as analogous to what the sea does to a beach, depositing and removing. The painting carries a history, much like the coastline. Not all of it is visible. But all of it is present in what the viewer finally sees.

Claim: Lyrical Abstraction, the movement closest to Simon Kenny’s practice, is characterised by loose gestural mark-making, rich colour, and large-format canvases designed to produce direct sensory experience. It developed from Abstract Expressionism in the late 1960s as painters sought to combine emotional directness with greater attention to colour and atmosphere. Simon Kenny has worked within this tradition since 2003 and has exhibited across 14 countries.
Source: Tate, “Lyrical Abstraction,” tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/abstract-art, accessed April 2026. MoMA, “Abstract Expressionism,” moma.org, accessed April 2026. Artist CV, simonkennyart.com/about, verified April 2026.

What can nature-inspired abstract art offer a collector that landscape painting cannot?

A landscape shows you an immediate moment. Nature-inspired abstract art offers something less fixed: an encounter with the forces behind the view. Browse the collection and you will find paintings that do not describe coastal storms but attempt to reproduce the sensation of standing inside one, something a collector can return to on their own terms.

A representational landscape directs your attention. You look at the cliff, then the sea, then the boat. Abstract work opens the encounter rather than closing it. What the viewer brings is as active as what I put there. That is why abstract art speaks directly to people, even those who have never collected before. There is no right answer, only their own.

Collectors who live with my work often tell me that they see different things over time, that a painting shifts depending on mood or the quality of light that day. This is not sentimentality, instead, it is the psychology of abstract art at work: the painting as a conduit, not a destination.

Claim: Global art market sales reached an estimated USD 59.6 billion in 2025, up 4 per cent year-on-year, with 43 per cent of primary market dealers reporting improved sales expectations heading into 2026. Collector research published by Artsy consistently identifies emotional connection as the primary driver of purchase decisions ahead of investment potential or artist reputation.
Source: Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2026, artbasel.com/stories/the-art-basel-and-ubs-global-art-market-report-2026. Artsy collector data: artsy.net.

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes a painting “nature-inspired” rather than a landscape?

A landscape depicts a specific place seen at a specific moment. Nature-inspired abstract art translates the energy, atmosphere, or elemental forces of the natural world into non-representational form. The subject is the sensation rather than the scene. Both may begin with the same storm; what they produce are entirely different experiences for the viewer.

Is abstract art inspired by nature difficult to live with long-term?

Most collectors find the opposite. A representational landscape can feel exhausted over time, its meaning fixed on first viewing. A nature-inspired abstract work tends to change with light, mood, and what the viewer brings to it. Many collectors describe their relationship with abstract painting as something that deepens over years rather than settling immediately.

How do I know whether a coastal or storm-inspired painting will work in my home?

Scale and colour temperature are practical starting points. Guidance on displaying and living with abstract art at home is covered in the Art and the Home series, and design authorities such as Dezeen document how large-scale abstract works succeed in contemporary interiors. Give a storm-energy painting room to breathe. Viewing originals in person remains the most reliable guide.

The coast, the canvas, and the space between

The Kent coast is exposed and blunt, and, in winter, makes clear that you are a small presence in a large and powerful system. That is what I am trying to inject into these paintings: not a replica of the place itself, but the sensation of being a part of it.

If a painting can bring a collector into this experience, on an ordinary day at home, then I have been successful. That is my ultimate ambition. And yet, the coast does not care whether I achieve it, which draws me further towards its archaic charm.

You can find out more about my work here. To enquire about an original work or a contact, please get in touch directly. For the studio process and materials behind the work, read The Artist’s Sanctuary series.