'Any landscape we have seen, any place we have visited, takes on two different kinds of reality. It exists as an external thing - a truth, actuality, a certainty - and it exists in our minds as a memory, as something coloured by personal intuitions and experience. The distance between these two sorts of reality may be great or small, but often, or so it seems to me, it is the internal reality that is most powerful and enduring.
The way that we choose to remember a particular place has always interested me. I find I have vivid memories of certain places that I have never actually been to; images that come partly from films, photographs, paintings and books, but most of all from the imagination. The difference between the co-existing internal and external realities of landscape is what these paintings are partly about.
As a boy I used to listen to my father's stories about Darjeeling, where he stayed on leave, briefly, just after the war. In the sky above my home in South London I could imagine certain cloud formations, stacked up and touched by sunlight, as the snows of Kangchenjunga. I went to Darjeeling many years later, expecting to see the Himalayas for myself, and after days of heavy cloud I did eventually see Kangchenjunga briefly, at dawn from the roof of the youth hostel. But only on the postcards in the bazaar did the Himalayas tower in the sky above the sprawling town as I imagined they would. Now their telephoto clarity and Kodak blue skies seemed to defy belief. Even on a three-day trek to Sandakphu I woke to clouds obscuring the sunrise on Kangchenjunga. But however illusive and ethereal, the will-o-the-wisp mountain was there, dissolving and reforming like a shadow, and always would be in my memory.' |
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