Susie Leiper : On High Hills
The artist and the mountaineer: both experience an immense thrill when confronted with a blank canvas or cliff. And both feel a compelling impulse to make a mark on that forbidding expanse.
Great artists have claimed that their world held no higher pleasure for them than the sight of a white expanse of wall … To a mountaineer there is no less enchantment in the prospect of a fair wall of untouched rock … Geoffrey Winthrop Young, On High Hills, 1927
This observation confirms Geoffrey Winthrop Young's dual challenges as a writer and mountaineer. His magnificent descriptions provide most of the titles for this body of work, paintings that range from the madness of jagged peaks and paths to the placidity of foothills and frozen plateaux.
A keen hillwalker, Susie came to painting through a fascination with Chinese landscape art where the emphasis is strongly on the mountain. She is also known as a calligrapher and lettering artist, sometimes combining text and paint, sometimes separating the two. Navigating between the monumental and the miniscule, Susie works on everything from vast walls and canvases to small wood tablets and artist books.
She exhibits widely and her work is held in a number of national institutions including the National Library of Scotland, the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Royal Collection. Susie lives and works in Edinburgh and this is her sixth exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery. An in-depth interview with Roger Spence is available on https://www.art-scot.com/susie-leiper.
