The Collapse of the Western Pillar Painting

Alexander Heaton's work reaches deep into the imagination, searching for mans most primeval interaction with nature. His paintings attempt to capture that first interaction, and the sense of wonder and spirituality as humanity confronts omnipresence. Alex works from experience, researching and conducting studies in the remotest natural settings. Through long and meaningful communion with nature his many drawings and paintings assert the inherent worth of deep spiritual reflection and recognise union with land and elements. He often draws upon mystical experiences and noetic connections with Logos to illustrate in paint the words of the divine presence felt in the places he chooses to depict. He draws upon such wells of references as shamanism, mythology, gnosticism, extreme sports, and ecstatic mountain lore. Landscape Artist As a mountaineer Alex, studies and researches themes directly. He often thinks nothing of walking and climbing to remote places in the Himalaya or Alps just to cast an eye on his artistic muse – "I am the lonely figure lured by mountains, dark forests, alpine skies and forbidding ravines." 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. "My work teeters on the edge of a filmic realism and also at times uses sampled vignettes of other painter's work." There are hints of something more transcendant in the dark forests and crumbling glaciers that populate his works to date. It’s this struggle that fascinates him to keep painting. Recent works transports the viewer to hallucinatory and altered worlds. These are not real places, but are vignettes of sublime vistas I have experienced or sampled. The work touches on a common longing in us all to escape the modern urban landscape and throw oneself whole heartedly into serene expanses, and witness at first hand awe-inspiring natural phenomena. This isn’t always possible on a day-to-day basis, but painting as substitute for exploration can be. However, 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.