New Paintings

I've begun work on a couple of new paintings. The larger of the two is a 70cm square canvas and it's to be an alpine mountain painting of the Barre des Ecrins, a mountain I climbed on last summer. I was talking to Catia about the square format, which is slightly unusual (rectangles which are wider than they are high are 'landscape format' and they are the norm for landscape painting).

I said to her that my mountain paintings often seem to fit more easily in a square. Unlike flatter landscapes that seem to recede from the viewer in progressively thinner and more horizontal bands, the space in a mountain landscape is interrupted by the vertical wall of the mountain. The mountain face looms more claustrophobically to block the space to fill the square view and the eye is drawn up in a series of diagonals. For me as a mountaineer the 'normal' (easiest) routes to climb these mountains often follow a sequence of zig-zagging lines from the broad base to the summit. I hope that the viewers eyes follow the painted planes on the snow as they follow one of the many possible climbing lines.
In this painting the summit catches the morning sunrise; a golden goal that draws you upwards. The morning after I watched this sunrise and photographed it for my painting I was on the mountain, crossing the boundary from the cold nightshade into the golden sunshine after several hours of walking up the steepening glaciers.
I thought I'd give you a look at the painting in progress and I'll show it again when I think it may be finished.