What more there is lies within the mountain…

Susie Leiper

 

I am excited to announce that the talented Susie Leiper has allowed Galileo to use her artwork for the endpapers of the hardback edition of Into the Mountain. An exhibition of her work, ‘One Never Quite Knows the Mountain…’ was held at Edinburgh’s Open Eye Gallery from 23rd June to 24th July 2017. All titles of her works were from Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain.

What more there is lies within the mountain …   

‘In her slim masterpiece The Living Mountain Nan Shepherd invites us to look inside the mountain: into the hollows, the chasms, the burns, the lochs. This resonates with me and informs my work, with diaphanous layerings and geological strata drawing us further in. It is not absurd to say that embarking on a painting is similar to tackling the ascent of a mountain – both are blank canvases on which to trace marks, all of which then become “aspects of one entity, the living mountain”.

I seek a kind of soothing serenity in my work, like the escapism afforded by the mountains. I love being in them: Scotland’s Munros, the French Pyrenees, the sacred peaks of China. I love painting them.

As a tribute to Nan Shepherd and the mountains of Scotland, most of the painting titles refer to Scotland’s Munros, in translation from the Gaelic’.

Born and educated in Glasgow, Leiper has degrees from the University of St Andrews and the Courtauld Institute of Art. She is a Fellow of the Society of Scribes and Illuminators, works freelance in Edinburgh and has a longstanding involvement with a painters’ group run by Paul Keir.