Exhibition starts 20th Nov in Grasmere
http://www.heatoncooper.co.uk/article.php?xArt=47
Superb intro from Gwen Moffat:
Lines of Ascent
An exhibition of William Heaton Cooper’s original guide-book crag drawings for the Fell and Rock Climbing Club, combined with his climbing photographs of the1930’s and 1940’s and paintings and drawings which reference mid-twentieth century climbing.
The exhibition explores the process of imagining new routes and the aesthetics of looking at, drawing, and painting mountains and rock.
Heaton Cooper. A tribute from Gwen Moffat. é
In the forties we lived to climb and everything was new, untried, unexplored. Guide books were essential and two compilers stood out from the rest: Edwards in Snowdonia for his idiosyncrasy, Heaton Cooper for the accuracy of his drawings in the Lakeland guides. He was a man who knew his mountains; in his illustrations the routes are lines running up pencil-shaded rock where every crack and overhang, every buttress is correct and matched neatly to the text.
I still have those guides: over sixty years old, waterworn, mud-stained, dog-eared and annotated and still consulted to verify a date of ascent, noting how I found a route, turning to the plan to see where the next pitch went had I not retreated from the crux.
The guides are one thing, once the climber passes ninety they belong to another time, another world, but, in the 1950s we discovered his paintings and by then people had just enough cash to buy prints. For many climbers the first picture in the first home of their own was a Heaton Cooper. So this was the other thing for, if guides are now little more than reference books, the mountains are part of current living. They are on the other side of the valley, at the end of the lake and through the trees, and if all else fails they are in living rooms, on walls of halls and bedrooms in innumerable homes of mountain lovers.
Heaton Cooper is venerated, and not because he was a climber, a pioneer, a draughtsman and geologist, a man who understood the soul of rock, he was all of these and more: something between a realist and an impressionist. Light and texture are of his essence; water flows and cascades in his becks, whispers in his summer falls – you watch for the glimpse of a dipper. His rock is warm and gritty under the hands: feeling achieved by brush strokes. A sunbeam finds a hole in storm cloud to slip past the black bulk of a mountain and strike water on a shadowed tarn with a colour that is no colour but pure light.
To term the best of his paintings sublime may be dismissed as subjective but no one can challenge nor deny me when I maintain that just one cherished Heaton Cooper can haunt the mind.
