World Art Day is held on April 15th, each year, a date chosen by the International Association of Art to mark the birthday of Leonardo da Vinci’s birthday.
Da Vinci was chosen as a symbol world peace, freedom of expression, tolerance, brotherhood and multiculturalism. The overall idea is to emphasize the importance of art in the lives of everyone, but why celebrate art for just one day?
The Heaton Cooper Studio’s Archive Gallery shines a spotlight on the creative endeavours of mountain artists the world over… our aim is to encourage you to stop and appreciate the wonderful creativity that surrounds you… the creativity of nature, which generations of artists in the Heaton Cooper family have strived to capture…
Why have the artists in the family focussed on mountains? Quite simply humans throughout time have a deep-seated affinity with these leviathans in the landscape – mountains have in essence always been part of a commonly held system of ancestor worship since the dawn of time. We have immortalized fallen brethren in their edifice, we see them as sites of revelation and inspiration part of an ever-present quest to purify the spirit and find renewal.
Artists themselves are no different, depicting mountain landscapes seeking to reconcile the objective, visual, geological truth of mountains with the subjective, mental, emotional experience of mountain scenery. Some simply wish to represent or replicate their obvious beauty, whilst others opt to study and explore various aesthetic elements, like light, colour, and texture and some use mountain scenes to tell a story, illustrate an idea, or conceptualize a metaphor.
Whatever the artists’ reasoning the inextricable link between the worship of the ancestors and mountains is largely inseparable, it forms an interconnected web between history, landscape, and culture, one that has been formed over millennia, a web that to this day connects us to mountain landscapes…
And we at the Heaton Cooper Studio are proud to show this connection…
As part of the celebration of World Art Day 2019 we are honoured to be able to show a remarkable piece of Lake District mountain history. A bronze plaque listing all 20 names of the members of the Fell and Rock-Climbing Club who served and died in the First World War – a plaque that was for many years set into the summit of Great Gable, the seventh highest mountain in the Lake District.
It’s accompanied by the Fell & Rock journals from 1914-1919, photographs of the dedication ceremony on Gable in 1924, a poem “We Bought Them a Mountain”, by Max Biden, photographs and crag drawings of Gable, and Fell & Rock guidebooks illustrated by William Heaton Cooper.
The exhibition marks the centenary of a campaign to buy Great Gable for the nation as a memorial to the 20 climbers who died in that Great War…This most vivid of memorials to the fallen, it could be argued is a very tangible link between ancestors, the act of remembrance and mountain landscapes…
It has been said art is the most genuine expression of the human soul… an expression that describes the story of humanity.