Today is Tuesday. That means it’s my regular day for rock-climbing. I have to have something to keep me sane and take me away from art. Some people to whom I’ve made similar remarks express surprise that, as a landscape artist, I make no connection between painting and climbing. I do paint landscapes that have to do with rock, and occasionally with climbers too. The thing that people find surprising, however, is that usually these pictures do not emerge from direct climbing experiences. It is far more likely that I will go out simply to sketch and gather reference material, but with no intention to climb whatsoever. Generally, I keep the two activities apart.
One reason for this, obviously, is that climbing is a sociable activity. I always climb with at least one partner, and it isn’t really on to ask somebody to hang around for half an hour while I amuse myself by drawing. There is, however, another and much more important reason.
Climbing and art require totally different mental frames. If I go to a crag in the frame of mind to think about climbing, I’m looking at the rock with routes in mind, anticipating movement, and climbing in the imagination. If I am looking at the same crag with an artist’s eye-view, I’m looking at texture, form, colour, and so on. I find that one mind-set excludes the other pretty well completely.
I think that this tells us something very important about art. People often go on about the sources of art in terms of “inspiration”. I’m never very sure what that means. Often it is confused with something much less mysterious, namely, attention. I think that to a very large extent artists are not characterised by the possession of some mysterious spiritual quality, called “inspiration”. We are simply trained to direct our attention in a highly focussed way. Our work (and I’m sure that this is true of landscape painting) is literally a matter of vision, but not in the sense of having some kind of revelation to the mind’s eye. It is, literally, a matter of seeing, and our seeing is directed by attention.
Climbing lifts the spirits …. and so literally involves inspiration. When I’m doing it, however, I’m taking a holiday from art.