SWANAGE artist Brian Graham has recently enjoyed a spectacularly successful new exhibition at the prestigious Hart Gallery in London's Islington.

Large canvases have, I am told, been fairly flying off the wall as Graham's work continues to fascinate both those with a love of paint on canvas and some of Britain's greatest archaeological thinkers.

For Graham's painting - which is celebrated in a new book Flint and Flame by Charlotte Mullins - has always been a response to the ancient landscape and particularly that of the Isle of Purbeck, the Dorset coastline and Cranborne Chase.

His works lie tantalising somewhere between the abstract and the figurative, they play with scale and ponder on the process of evolution. They refer to mysterious long-forgotten struggles that have scoured and scarred the land.

A lifetime in Dorset and an intuitive sense of place somehow gives Graham, now 62, a deep understanding of these things that so many of us take for granted. Over the past two decades his growing confidence as a painter has steadily increased the power of the multi-layered messages contained in his works.

No wonder that top names in archaeology are so drawn to his art. It is telling that one of his projects, Book of Boxgrove, can be found in the permanent collection at the Natural History Museum. To find out more about Graham, his work and love of ancient landscape check out Flint and Flame which finds Mullins, an arts writer, broadcaster and former editor of Art Review and V&A Magazine, exploring this singular artist.