Every Tuesday, as far as is possible, I go climbing with a friend. It’s the main form of physical exercise I get, and in many respects assures my sanity. (After having broken two arms last year, several of my friends reckon it must be the key to my insanity, but that’s another discussion.) I was thinking today that it is curious, the way in which personality patterns recur in quite different and unrelated contexts. At the most obvious level, there must be a link between my love of being out in wild country, and my commitment to landscape painting. It goes deeper than that. A persistent failing in my climbing is the fact that I don’t think things through in advance, planning my moves ahead. So I end up needing to move the hand which remains vital to my continuing balance or control of the situation. I watched a really good climber when on holiday in Italy recently, and it was impressive the way in which one movement flowed into another. It was like watching somebody dancing upwards. By way of contrast, I’m constantly having to improvise in order to recover my position.
To my surprise, I realise that I can find myself in an analogous situation as a painter. Starting work on a new canvas I suddenly become aware that I can’t make any progress with one aspect of it until I have resolved some other problem. There is a natural and necessary order in the creative process, and I am (metaphorically) leading with the wrong hand. I would like to think that, as a climber, I’m better in this respect than I was. Does it come with experience? I’d like to believe so, but I do fear that as a painter I’m possibly a slow learner. I’ll keep at it.