Landscape Artist
Brief info
Alexander Heaton is a landscape artist and mountaineer whose work reaches deep into the imagination, searching for man's most primeval interaction with nature. His paintings attempt to capture that first interaction, and the sense of wonder and spirituality as humanity confronts omnipresence.
As a mountaineer Alex, studies and researches themes directly. He often thinks nothing of walking and climbing to remote places in the Himalayas or Alps just to cast an eye on his artistic muse. The paintings look out from dreamy summits and contemplate the beyond. Through his canvases, he continues on the romantic journey but updates this visual language with the possibility of going to higher, more challenging, and steeper places.
His recent works transport the viewer to hallucinatory and altered worlds. These are not real places but are vignettes of sublime vistas he has experienced or sampled. The work touches on a common longing in us all to escape the modern urban landscape throw oneself wholeheartedly into serene expanses, and witness firsthand awe-inspiring natural phenomena. The work at times offers us dangerous realities of complete desolation or abandonment at the ends of the world. This comes from his own experiences as a mountaineer. Witnessing in nature not love or beauty but an unsentimental commitment to constant change and renewal. In this way, the work laments our own mortality and strives to find salvation in our experience of the here and now. He is seeking through the act of painting to engage with nature through intense looking to see something of the spiritual. Nature at her most harsh and unsentimental as an overriding force is the main focus of interest.
During his residency at Sagarmatha Next, Alex plans to make upcycled painted sculptures of the iconic mountains of the Himalayan region from waste from the Everest region. Alex will also take part in a creative outreach program with local sherpa children to help provide more educational opportunities. As a painter of vast mountains, Alex aims to give back something and find new ways to utilise waste that would otherwise pollute and harm the ecosystem of this glacial realm.