Chris Cyprus on Landscape Artist of the Year, allotments and online scammers

“Art as a competition isn’t for me,” says Chris Cyprus, eyes poking out from beneath a beanie that struggles to contain his cascading grey locks. “It’s a subjective thing.”

These aren’t words you’d expect to hear from someone who has just features on the Landscape Artist of the Year programme on Sky Arts, yet he felt compelled to take on the challenge after annual nudges from the show’s producers became too strong to ignore. 

“I wanted to change the way I do things because I was worried about getting complacent. I’ve been doing this for 25 years.” 

Although the Mossley-based artist was always a dab-hand with a paintbrush while growing up, it wasn’t until a back operation forced him out of the construction industry that he took up art full-time. He’d sit for hours studying old-timers tending to veg at his local allotment before someone told him he’d have to become a member if he wanted to be on site. He had to patient, though. 

“Three years later I got a call saying a plot had come up,” he says. “The waiting lists for allotments are massive.” 

There’s a direct lineage in Chris’s art from that of another famed Tameside painter, LS Lowry. While they both capture scenes of working-class life in the north, the two artists have radically different styles. Lowry picked up the techniques for his lively stick figures and gloomy palette from Adolphe Valette, his teacher at the Manchester School of Art and indelible lifelong influence.  

Cyprus, meanwhile, is entirely self-taught and relishes using vivid colours, exaggerated perspectives and – when they’re in the frame – stoic pensioners in flat caps. His depiction of people is closer to that of the bubble perms and chunky limbs of Beryl Cook. 

“Some people might say that my work’s Lowry-esque, but that’s because they identify it with the area and its aesthetic, that’s all,” Chris says. “The approach is the same, I have a simple kind of life, I go walking and I see things and that’s where my paintings come from. There are no hidden messages, it’s not controversial, it’s just the world as I see it. They’re really the only similarities.” 

His studio at the far end of a Mossley mill is home to plenty of other artists. Neighbours include wildlife specialist Liz Stirk, 2024 Thomson Art Prize winner Linda Edwards, and even Buzz Hawkins who created The Bradshaws. His corner unit straddles the pre-1974 boundary of Cheshire and Yorkshire, but is now wholly inside Greater Manchester, a fudge that still irks the town’s older residents who cling to their white rose heritage. It’s also Baltic inside, with Chris making a rare winter foray into the studio and gallery space, whose walls are peppered with his distinctive paintings of Mossley, Stockport, Hebden Bridge and, pride of place above his desk, one of the tumbledown cottages of Robin Hood’s Bay. 

“It’s a wonderful place that northeast coast; Scarborough, Robin Hood’s Bay, Runswick Bay, Whitby. I love it. It’s a painter’s paradise up there. You’d have to go to some of the Cornish villages for more of that sort of thing, but it’s unique with all the little red roofs and the coastal light is just completely different to Pennine light.” 

Although Chris says that four-hour slot to complete his Landscape Artist of the Year picture was something he’d “never normally do”, he’ll often have creative bursts where he’ll dash off the preliminary stages of multiple works “dead quick”. The final touches can take months or even years to complete. As such, Chris estimates that he has around 300-400 unfinished canvases. 

It’s easy to believe. Every shelf and cupboard heaves with paintings jammed in every which way. There are huge pieces – brilliant ones - studded with tiny details just propped on the floor. They’re everywhere. It takes a good ten minutes of rummaging to dig out his picture from the competition, which he eventually unearths hidden away in a box at the bottom of yet another pile. 

“We went to Llanberis in my campervan. They tell you where you’re going, but you don’t know until the day what you’ll be looking at. They were filming another group the day before, so I went up to have a sneaky look and it was beautiful overlooking a lake. But the next day, they moved all the pods about a mile down the road to a slate quarry, and it’s not a pretty sight. 

“It’s something I would never normally do. There was nothing for the rule of thirds or anything that would make a good composition for a painting, so it was really, really difficult. It’s actually quite a nice painting. You could say it’s a semi-abstract of a big gash in the side of a hill where they’ve been chopping away at the slate for a hundred-odd years.” 

One unwanted side-effect of reaching a certain level of demand is that Chris attracts a handful of social media scammers. He has already abandoned his Twitter/X (“it’s a cesspit now”) and Threads (“bots every day”) profiles and is winding down his presence of Facebook, too, after people cloned his account and contacted fans who left comments on his posts, offering to sell paintings at knock-down prices. 

“They’re doing it plain view of me. I couldn’t live with it if someone said they’d bought one of my paintings for a grand or more, but where is it? I’ve complained to Facebook, but they’ve gone ‘No, it doesn’t breach our community standards.’ What do you mean, it’s fraud! So, the safest way is to just take it off and delete my profile.” 

He says the only way he’ll message anybody about paintings is through his website, which is where most of his sales come from. He could well be busy this week, with a second TV appearance on Sunday on Alan Titchmarsh’s Love Your Weekend show, where he’ll unveil a picture of the farm he started when he was last on the programme in January. 

As for a repeat performance on Landscape Artist of the Year? 

“I enjoyed it, but I wouldn’t do it again.” 

Chris Cyprus featured on Landscape Artist of the Year on Wednesday February 19 and is available to watch again on Sky Stream.