GEOSCAPE
Discover the Art of Geometric Landscape | Geoscape by Richard and Michelle J Oliver
For over thirty years, Richard and his wife and creative partner, Michelle Oliver, have returned each summer to the small fishing village of Wissant, where Michelle’s family home has been a constant presence in their lives. This quiet corner of France, nestled between Calais and Boulogne, has become a place of deep personal and artistic significance, a wellspring of inspiration and memory.
Out of this long-standing connection and their shared creative background has grown a new visual style they call Geoscape — a term they’ve coined to describe their evolving body of work. While “geo” may suggest geography, their Geoscapes are not maps or literal depictions. Instead, they are geometric impressions of place, abstracted compositions that distill the atmosphere, architecture, and emotional resonance of lived landscapes.
Their collaboration began during their university days in the early 1990s, where they were both profoundly influenced by the Bauhaus movement, screen printing, and the stripped-back clarity of modernist design. Those early explorations shaped not only their aesthetic but also their creative bond. Michelle’s background in textile and interior design brings a refined, tactile sensibility to the work, a focus on form, pattern, and color balance, while Richard’s foundation in painting and printmaking infuses the compositions with atmosphere and narrative.
Together, they blend digital studies, screen printing, stenciling, and acrylics into artworks that are semi-abstract yet deeply grounded in place. Their palette reflects the soft, shifting hues of the northern coast, faded stone, muted skies, and the quiet dignity of old walls that have withstood the elements. These are landscapes reduced to their essence: structured, balanced, and full of memory.
Geoscape is not just a visual approach, it is the meeting point of shared history, place, and design. Rooted in decades of returning to the same village, drawing from the same well of inspiration, and growing a life together as artists and partners, Richard and Michelle’s Geoscapes invite viewers into a world where structure holds emotion, and where geometry becomes a vessel for memory.
