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April 8, 2011
The current artist in resident at Landscape Art Research Queenstown (LARQ) is Julian Cooper, an English painter based in the Lake District, UK, who is a mountain climber and who specialises in mountain painting and rock surfaces.
Julian Cooper, At the Base of the Eiger, 2004, oil on canvas
His focus in the autumn residency is the patterns, textures and forms of the local rocky landscape --mountains and quarries--and presumably his studio work will be based on plein air painting as a recording device (ie., studies), the camera and memory.
His latest work interests me. He has move on from pen-air painting in the high Andes, and the semi-abstract and highly-textured paintings of the Himalayas in the 1990s to paint industrially-worked rockfaces which are literally the interface between human beings and nature.
Julian Cooper, Cumbria Quarry, oil on canvas
The two sites are at the abandoned slate quarries at the Langdale and Coniston areas in the UK, and at the Carrara marble quarries – the historic quarries from which Michelangelo took his marble and which are now quarried on an industrial scale.
Julian Cooper,Quarry Cave, 2006,
oil on linen
I presume the open cut mines in Queenstown represent the third site.
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