London-based artist Neil Raitt creates vibrant landscape paintings that draw viewers into surreal, utopian worlds. Each captivating composition blends mountains, jungles, rivers, and wildlife, creating psychedelic scenes that feel both familiar and dreamlike.
Raitt, now 39, has spent years shaping his unique painting style, but he’s been making art for as long as he can remember. “I used to copy all the characters and musicians from my magazines, usually gaming magazines that I would collect,” he tells My Modern Met. “My bedroom walls were filled with drawings of Crash Bandicoot, Spice Girls, and all the pop cultural figures I was surrounded by.”
Growing up, Raitt was influenced by his creative parents and developed a style that blurs the line between art and craft. He reveals, “My dad was a painter in his spare time and would paint animals, dragons, and lots of fantasy-based landscapes.” However, it wasn’t until Raitt convinced his mom to get cable TV that the young artist found someone he could really learn from.
“I remember being sick from school one day and watching Bob Ross‘ The Joy of Painting on The Discovery Channel,” he reveals. “It was a very relaxing and almost mesmerizing experience, and it kind of stuck with me.”
Raitt adds, “I eventually started painting along to these episodes much later when I was at art school in Norwich, and during my MA at The Royal College of Art it eventually found its way into my practice in the form of repetition and a tool to explore abstract painting ideas. It really opened up a lot of the underlying interests I have including the subversion of scale, collage, nature, and the boundaries between craft and fine art.”
Many of Raitt’s works from his time at The Royal College of Art are filled with repeating motifs. Some have the charm of vintage or kitsch wallpaper, while the more intricate patterns almost feel like those Magic Eye optical illusions from the ’90s.
“I started to get a sense of what attracted me most to painting and that was its ability to subvert scale, reinvent histories, and weave different worlds together,” he says. “I remember making a canvas full of mountains, partly because there was an episode of The Joy Of Painting where Bob Ross says, ‘The best way to learn how to paint a mountain is to fill an entire canvas with them.’”
Raitt adds, “This was the beginning of a whole body of work as it opened up lots of questions for me about surface and abstraction and allowed me to explore lots of avenues all while having a framework I had built and internal rules that I would make and break during the process.”
Raitt deliberately alters our perception of nature, challenging expectations and inviting us to see it in a new way. His vibrant work celebrates not just nature’s beauty, but also its mystery. He explains, “More and more, through color and mark-making, my goal is to create places that are partly about what’s going on the surface, the shape of a tree trunk, a familiarly alien moment in a landscape, and also a subverted sense of reality where there is a sense of wonder and the overarching power of nature.”
Check out some of the artist’s works below and find more from his portfolio by following Neil Raitt on Instagram.
London-based artist Neil Raitt creates vibrant landscape paintings that draw viewers into surreal, utopian worlds.
Each captivating composition blends mountains, jungles, rivers, and wildlife, creating psychedelic scenes that feel both familiar and dreamlike.
Many of Raitt’s works also feature repeating motifs that evoke the charm of vintage wallpaper.
Neil Raitt: Instagram
My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Neil Raitt.
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