Soon after the opening of the Commedia dell'Arte exhibition, Cohen moved out of London, to rural Kent (the first time he had lived outside a city, except during military service). 'It was Kent that engaged my feelings more fiercely than any other place I can remember', he told the journalist Philip Oakes. He started painting the landscape immediately, but it was a new challenge; he realized he would need to transform his technique once more:
What hit me was an incredible feeling of privacy. Driving along a country road I felt the hedges crowding in on me.
The leaves were so thick that they were like a wall. We passed a hedge-cutter and he glared at us as if we'd interrupted some ritual. Then he stepped down into the ditch and disappeared as though he'd been absorbed by the landscape. Everything was so impenetrably, all-over green that I could think of no way of getting into it as a painter.
The way I'd been working simply wouldn't do.
