This exhibition is made possible through an artists residency sponsored by the Oficina Bartolemeu dos Santos (OBS) a foundation that maintains a printmaking studio in Tavira built by “Barto” dos Santos who was a famous Portuguese printmaker and taught at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London. Paul was a student of Barto’s and it has been privilege for him to work and live in the studio of his mentor. The work in the show has been mostly made in Tavira, at the OBS studio.
Prior to arriving in Portugal Paul traveled to Nepal with his wife Linda and the mountains were the inspiration for “Against the Sky”. They have travelled to the Himalaya’s several times over the past twenty years and Paul had already begun to experiment with mountain imagery. This most recent trip allowed Paul to draw, paint, and photograph the region with the intention of transforming these studies into a series of prints to be shown here at the Biblioteca Municipal Álvaro de Campos.
Through intense observation these mountain images have been recorded and transformed into drawings on copper plates and then etched using a spontaneous and painterly use of aquatint and acid processes. Many of these prints are large; they confront the audience with the physicality of singular mountain forms juxtaposed with a myriad of tonal and textural surfaces woven together and intricately etched and contained inside their bold contours. At a time when lens-based and computer-generated imagery has become part of the public’s imagination these prints celebrate the enduring power of the interaction between nature and the artist using traditional techniques and their own hand to construct pictures capable of inspiring awe.
The show makes use of the few images that survive of Maurice Herzog’s 1950 expedition to climb Annapurna. Herzog’s photo’s show vast glaciers that now have receded and are much diminished. The images of this exhibit are another record and “bear witness to the change already underway—irreversible in some cases—and ask us to consider these relic of ancient ice ecosystems and what’s being lost and the legacy we are leaving behind.”* Herzog thanks the mountains who “bestowed on us their beauty…the quintessence of purity, a fantastic universe where the presence of man was not foreseen, perhaps not desired.”
- Municipal poster
- “Himal panorama”. 18 x 72″
- gallery view
- “Annapurna 1950″ 18 x 24”
- “Helicopter at Laboche”. 24 x 36″
- “peak #1″ 4 x 6”
- “peak #3″ 4 x 6”
- “peak #4″ 4 x 6”
- “trekker (tiles)” 8 x 12″
- “summit” 18 x 24″
- “Khumbu glacier”. 18 x 24″
- gallery view
- “Himalaya” 36 x 48″
- “Moiry Glacier” 18 x 24″
- “Ama Dablam” 18 x 24
- “At the Glacier’s edge” 12 x 18″
