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Paintings of Mt
Kailash by Julian Cooper
Julian Cooper
has been looking closely at, and painting, mountain and rock
faces for a very long time and is now regarded as one of the
most original and thought provoking mountain painters
working today.
In his search
for a new and relevant contemporary language for mountain
painting, Cooper has focused on idiosyncratic aspects of the
English Lake District and travelled to remote and
inhospitable parts of the world to experience and record
their mountainous landscapes: the Peruvian Andes,
Kanchenjunga in Nepal, Mont Blanc and the Eiger in the Alps.
 Mt. Kailash in
the Trans-Himalaya of Tibet is Cooper’s most recent subject;
a unique mountain that is the sacred site of four religions
yet so remote and difficult to get to that it is visited by
only a handful of pilgrims each year. Strikingly beautiful
it has dominated the Indian imagination for millennia and is
central to their world of myth, literature, architecture,
sculpture, music and dance. It is both a real mountain and a
conceptual mountain.
Travelling from
Kathmandu into Tibet and across the unremitting harshness of
the Tibetan plateau Cooper arrived at Kailash in early
spring 2006. Climbing this sacred site is forbidden, so
following the centuries old route of Buddhist, Hindu and
Jain pilgrims, he circumambulated the Mountain, observing
and recording his experiences. Painting plain air and taking
copious photographs he started the process of engagement
with the Mountain and its ethos that now continues back in
his studio where the imaginative weight of the subject will
reveal itself on large semi-abstract canvases that are a
synthesis of the on-site studies, photographs and memory.
Cooper’s
paintings are never simply topographical but touch a deeper
psychological chord; they are about the relation between man
and his environment. Where the Kanchenjunga paintings dealt
with the relentless process of nature without any reference
to humanity and the Eiger and Honister ones were about the
history of human drama on a mountain face, the Kailash
series explore the links between myth, religion and
sacredness on one hand and the pure geological and physical
reality on the other, but on a landscape that must remain
untouched.
More information. |
Doug uses his photographs to illustrate his mountaineering presentations.
More of his photographs have been on the front cover of
mountain books than those of any other photographer. His
work appears in his own book ‘Himalayan Climber – A
photographic autobiography’.