On God, Mountains & Time

For the past 6 years or so I’ve been working from a love for, and fascination with mountains. They are like the grandfathers of nature - and I believe that they are an absolute gift from the ultimate Creator. They communicate and aid our understanding of His sublimity so effectively. They sing his praises.

I am attracted to mountains mainly because I read them as sublime. Throughout history people have tried to make sense of mountains, and in this process have attributed to them readings such as Edmund Burke’s concept of the sublime, and Thomas Burnet’s idea of mountains as repulsive scars and catastrophes of nature (1). Over time people have had similar fascinations and musings about mountains, and so we become part of a wealth of information that leads and inspires the reading, experience and communication of mountains as terrifyingly beautiful, wise, magnificent and overwhelming.

As the grandfathers of nature, they have witnessed much more than any human or animal could ever hope to - if you want to entertain that thought. And I suppose it therefore makes sense that when I am in the mountains or see mountains around me I feel a sense of perspective, a feeling of something greater, familiarity and timelessness. They seem constant and close, but are also swept into years and layers of readings and representations, which in turn play a big role in making them what they are to us – and this also generates a feeling of distance. To me, mountains are a play between something very consistent and firm, and something very active and ever-progressing, a play between something repulsive and something so incredibly attractive, they are real and a fantasy, outside of us, and all in the mind – all at once. Whether the ‘they’ is the representations which make them what they appear to us, or the real thing that are a magnificent gift from God – they are the most amazing source for art making.

My creative practice is a developing artistic investigation in the communication of my experience with mountains through drawing and painting, in my context, on my timeline. Aesthetically, at the moment, I am mostly focusing on mountains as a rich source of intricate linework, and predominantly relating this over in layered line drawings. However, much of the linework that I produce, is of course muscle memory, a work of the mind, and largely controlled by the ‘space’ (physical space, headspace, time space and the space of my drawing surface) in which I am working – a fact that I can no longer help to be deliberately aware of. I like to embrace my process, the reality of working and the truth involved there, particularly the time it took to produce the drawing. So I draw attention to it through aesthetic elements such as controlled ink splashes, formed by systematically wiping my brush on the edge of the ink water bowl, ink brush dabs resulting from using my drawing surface as a sort of palette, dabbing my brush on the page before I start with linework, and most notably, a list of times formed by jotting down the times I start and stop working. Subtle reminders that artworks take time and effort, and are made within a personal context. I push and play with the tension between structure and chaos, between my control and lack thereof, between the tame and sublime, and between repulsion and attraction. And through my process I aim to delight in what these magnificent phenomena shout about the one who made them, I thank him and attempt to praise him.

(1) Schama, S. 1995. Landscape and Memory. London: Fontana Press