The Valkyries and Huginn and Muninn Painting

Alexander Heaton's 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. Alex works from experience, researching and conducting studies in the remotest natural settings. 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 to cast an eye on his artistic prey – "I am the lonely figure lured by mountains, dark forests, alpine skies and forbidding ravines." The paintings look out from the summits of mountains and contemplate the beyond. In the most recent body of work there has been a shift in pallet colour to muted greys offset by florescent pinks and greens. Such a choice serves to place the viewer as a climber in the highest zone of the Himalayas where existence is only ever perceived through tinted lenses changing all light to hyper-colour vibrant and raised contrast levels. One is overwhelmed by the effects of oxygen depletion and dizziness therefore perception becomes about euphoria mixed with intense self-preservation. These paintings are sometimes left in a state of incompletion. The unresolved passages reflect the painting process its self as a journey which may be more important that the finished destination. Much in the same way as the process of climbing a mountain can be discovery of what is revealed within as much as or perhaps more than without, that being on a summit for example. Figures populate these paintings some in double exposure some with voids in them. Such devices act as metaphors to the dispersed sense of self as one ascends higher altitudes. Prayer flags blow in the wind and break apart literally in the brush strokes. These link and act as ceremonial reminders of the real world of family, friends back home and what is at stake in the spiritual ladder world. Puja ceremonies are conducted to appease the mountain deities and bring safe passage whilst scaling the mountain goddess.Through his canvases he continues on the true Romantic journey, but in a very 21st-century way. "My work teeters on the edge of a filmic realism and also at times uses sampled vignettes of other painters work." There are hints of something more sinister in the dark forests and crumbling glaciers that populate his works to date. It’s this struggle that fascinates him to keep painting.