'My Yorkshire landscape paintings sell across the world': Artist Judith Levin opens her Otley gallery

Here, Levin’s paintings are displayed simply on tall white walls, while others rest on easels. Each picture draws the eye towards it, then into it, so that you can smell the damp earth and feel the clods beneath your boots, sense the wind whipping through the heather.

Scattered among these dramatic landscapes are Levin’s floral still lifes, rich and hypnotic, their interior world a counterpoint to the open-air sweeping vistas.

Levin’s heather moorland paintings are particularly popular, often bought by city dwellers. “I think it's the stillness, and the changing of light, and the sense of escape,” she says, as we stand in her studio, taking in a painting of the Cow and Calf Rocks near Ilkley.

“This is a very murky, dump, March day, where the heather is brown, the water running down after lots of rain.

“People love the Middleton Woods also, Ilkley, because of the bluebells, which are incredible. It's May when the bluebells are out, and there's just blankets of carpets of bluebells.”

Her paintings range in size from tiny miniatures the size of a business card to canvases 6ft across, so high that she has to stand on stools to reach the top or alter her easel.

Born in 1956, she stands under 5ft tall. She paints incessantly, rising early and often working beyond midnight.

“I never tire of it,” she says. “The other day when I was working, I was thinking, I must go to the supermarket. And an hour later, I must go to the supermarket. I thought, is this an obsession?

“And I don't think it is. What it feels like, it's like … have you ever been so involved in reading a novel, and you don't want to put it down? So you think, I'll just have a look at the next chapter … and it goes on, and the day goes by, and you still haven't been to the supermarket.”

Last November she moved her finished paintings into The Art Works picture framers and gallery at Courthouse Street in Otley town centre. She lives five minutes’ away in a cottage with a garden, having moved there two years ago from her apartment at Gledhow Hall, near Leeds.

Levin was 15 when she left school and sold her first painting. Home was in Harehills with her parents, Maurice and Margot Crane, who met in Leeds but were both just under 18 when they escaped Nazi Germany and travelled to the UK via the Kindertransport rescue mission.

She began working full-time as an artist in 1989, teaching herself by painting flowers in vases, experimental, from imagination. She was a mother by then; her three sons, David, Mark and Joshua, are now in their 40s and 30s.

She took her still lifes to a gallery in Leeds. They sold faster than she could paint them. They began selling in London and on it went. She began painting landscapes as respite, a fresh window to the world.

Otley holds fond memories of childhood visits. “What I was impressed by was the Chevin, that drive where you suddenly see the hill,” she says.

“I gave up driving quite a few years ago, and I thought this is a lovely place to be. You don't need to drive around Otley.”

The area has given her everyday new landscape features, from campion meadows to streams and gulleys.

Levin uses a “pure painting” technique, freely composing with her brush without drawn or planned outlines, drawing on memory and imagination.

Many years ago, she tried painting outdoors on Ilkley Moor. “People gathered around,” she says. “A lovely man came and sat down and told me his life story. I wouldn't recognise him if I saw him again because I was concentrating on the painting. But there's something about painting or seeing somebody painting that makes people feel more relaxed.”

Buyers of her work come from near and far, Yorkshire, London, the US, Canada and Australia. She takes commissions from across the world. “There are people who have moved away from the area, and who remember particularly the Cow and Calf,” she says.

She is excited that the Bradford Pennine Gateway National Nature Reserve has been named one of the Seven Wonders of the World for 2026 by Condé Nast Traveller, the sole UK destination on the global list.

“It's going to bring people internationally to the area, particularly because of the heather moorland, which means I might be even busier in my retirement than I thought,” she says.

“Heather doesn't grow in many places in the world. The climate here and the history of the geology here produces all this breathtaking heather.”

Her floral still lifes are also popular in the US. There has been a secondary market for her paintings for many years, and they come up in auction houses around the world.

“In America they fetch far, far more than here,” she says. “There are some people who buy the work for investment, and others who buy it for sentimental reasons. Some who buy it for decor.”

As well as her own gallery, which is by appointment, her work can be seen at Bingley Gallery, and at Yard Gallery near Belfast. There is something for all budgets, with the miniatures starting at £60, and some prints of originals. “I don't want people to feel that the work is out of reach,” she says.

Levin’s paintings can also be seen and bought on her own website, which her son Joshua helps run. “I'm not really so commercially minded,” she says. “The kind of personality that wants to stand in front of an easel all day is probably not the best business person.

“I'm very happy painting and not so interested in marketing, although I understand that that's a necessity. If I won the lottery, which I don't play, the first thing I'd do is buy more art materials.”

In a fast and changing world, her paintings offer solace and peace. “My work has been called ‘Valium on canvas’. Because of the pace in London, a large moorland view is calming,” she says.

AI, she says, is no threat to authentic art. “I got it to do an image in the style of my painting - dreadful, fortunately,” she says. “I'm not painting to perform. I'm not painting to impress or to compete.

“If you want a certain colour combination on your wall, AI will provide that. But it's not going to provide what genuine artists are doing. There's a human connection with painting.

“Where will the ideas come from? It will only come from programming; it will never come from experience.”

Local people, those used to the landscape and the calm, see weather. “Like, ‘I can feel that damp air coming in’,” says Levin. “That's the human experience. I don't think AI is ever going to be able to do that, because there is dampness in the air. I just remember it or I have the feeling of it. But AI will never have the feeling of it. It will only be able to simulate it.”

Judith Levin’s gallery is at The Art Works, Courthouse Street, Otley, where her show Between Seasons is running. See judithlevin.com.