From the moment of encountering these paintings I think a lot of people would ask how do you get the information?
 They’re all real places that I’ve visited and observed over a period of time. I’ve been on expeditions to the Andes and Himalayas that can last up to a couple of months but with this new series, Honister is in the Lake District close to where I live, and I visited the Eiger in summer 2003 and stayed for two weeks. I start by scanning the mountain, often through binoculars which sparks off ideas for paintings: amazing rock formations, conjunctions of things, the way the light falls on different surfaces on different days and different times of day. Then I take photographs with a telephoto lens so that I can get right into the mountain, and if I need to get even further in I scan them into my computer at home and zoom in even further. It doesn’t matter if the image starts to break-up, there’s always enough going on for the eventual translations into paint.
And you live amongst mountains and climb them?
Yes, I’ve lived most of my life in the Lake District and I’ve been a sporadic rock climber since I was a kid. I’ve also climbed on some of the bigger mountains around the world.
So there is a kind of mapping in terms of experience of the subject.
When I’m painting particular bits of form, bits of rock, I’m also imagining climbing it. I can feel the rock and I think this gives me a deeper mental contact with what it is I’m trying to describe with the paint. Working close to the surface I don’t really know how it’s going to read from a distance, but there’s part of my eye or brain that’s ten feet further back. I don’t quite know how it works, but I think it links in with the climbing bit.
In this very tall one, the scale and size recreate that awesome feeling you get when you encounter a mountain, when it towers over you. It works very well in that particular painting because it already controls the way in which you look; it takes the eye on a journey, bottom to top, top to bottom. You do sense that you’ve had an awesome experience. Having the sky in the painting helps you to read the scale, but that’s the only painting where you’ve got sky and I wanted to ask why you fill the canvas with mountain and you don’t stand back any more and let us see the profile of the mountain?
They’re about the experience of a mountain rather than it’s description, so I want to avoid the conventional idea of what a mountain looks like. I don’t want the image just to slot into that prejudiced part of the brain, and with a sky the tension of the mountain just goes.
I sense a loyalty to the mountain and wonder whether this brings you into conflict with your loyalty to the painting. What I mean is, if there’s a loyalty to the mountain is there a way in which it can make the language of paint more subservient, more descriptive?
It’s a constant fight but achieving the balance is what the work is about. In the early plein-air canvases I worried about the time and the weather, it surprised me that I wasn’t free to explore the subject deeply. There was far more temptation to be superficial and formulaic, and this encouraged the shift to studio based work. Now I don’t want to know too much about the actual mountain itself, I want to keep my distance, I want it to be a fiction, but I don’t want it to be false or inauthentic in terms of the mountain, or the rock.
What about taking the painterly language just that bit further and reinventing experience. Could you ever invent a mountain that started with you and the paint without the photography and without the particularness?
I used to paint invented landscapes but I got bored I suppose, there’s nothing beyond me that’s extended.
I can see that. These paintings are genuine, they’re to do with the experience of the actual and it’s this that stimulates the invention, and feeds the imagination. I can see that you couldn’t invent it from scratch, but relative to this question ‘could you paint your own mountain?’ is perhaps the question of whether during the process does the mountain change, does it become something else?
Yes. More and more I’m relaxing from the tight hold on what is topographical, seeing what happens with the paint on the canvas and allowing the other undercurrents of content and meaning to come through, and go with them, but always with the real mountain in my mind.
Do you find that when you think you’ve learnt something it’s often a false trail and you’ve got to creep up upon it by stealth again; play games so that it all comes out more natural?
That’s the thing that we see in a painting in that first two seconds when you open the studio door first thing in the morning. Often you can’t define it, but it does encourage you to push it, to blow the flames.
You also talk about process and how that to some extent that dictates things. You’ve mentioned throwing turps at the canvas and so on.
Whenever the surface just looks like a painted bit of stuff, without that otherness, I have to get a more accidental randomness back and turpsing down is one way of getting it. I also work with exceptionally long handled brushes that are very clumsy. I discovered them in Paris, they are beautifully balanced, and I’ve developed this technique that involves the whole shoulder; you feel your whole body is connected to the end of this brush that has a huge power to brush ratio compared to normal brushes.
Why? Are you making it purposefully difficult to paint detail, so that surface is very loose and painterly and it’s only from a distance, or in reproduction, that the graphic quality kicks in?
Yes. It’s deliberately cumbersome and it means that the painterly language isn’t simply obeying the rules dictated by the photograph. It’s a way of getting something else to happen in the brain. The eye, brain and body have to work in a different way. When you make a mark on the canvas you’re looking at that mark and how it works in itself, there isn’t anything else that’s important. When I’m making a mark there’s this little pocket in my brain, this little model of some three dimensional form that I’m translating through bits of paint. It’s an imaginary thing but they only appear realistic from far back.
So how do you see the recent works next to some of these earlier works? The ones made on the spot do have air and space and energy in them that you don’t recognise in these. You seem to be trying something else.
I do still make paintings from life wherever I go to augment the photographs and get into my head what’s going on but I don’t exhibit them with the main work. I did a whole series of the Eiger that probably have that kind of feeling of the space but don’t have anything else. Don’t forget my father and grandfather, William and Alfred Heaton-Cooper, were formidable topographical landscape painters, so in my background I had all these serious on-the-spot tutors, and that’s always lurking. I’m trying to get at a totally different way of reading mountains into the work.
I can see you can’t repeat what you are doing in something out there and that you have to reclaim it in terms of the object you’re making. You do get people who’ve devoted their lives to painting directly, they do it well and they do it with pleasure, but it never quite gets beyond the descriptive.
That’s what it says to me, it’s like the thing but it stops short of that kind of metaphorical level. It stops where it becomes interesting.
One of the artists that really does force the issue is Turner. A critic said at the time, and it was meant as a negative, but has now become in the contemporary sense a positive, ‘All you see when you look at Mr Turner’s work is paint’. You can see him inventing with paint, fully acknowledging the reality of the painting, but allowing us to experience the beauty and forces of nature in its most potent and reinvented form.
Michael Andrew’s painting is also very tightly related to some descriptive bit of reality but again there is usually that otherness, that strange thing that makes you look at the painting over and over again.
Some of the techniques that you use on your surfaces are reminiscent of some of the natural processes that go on on the mountain, the scouring and scraping and so on.
Yes and the eroding away, and sometimes when I’m half-way through a painting, and I’ve got these structures of slightly three dimensional bits of paint, and if things start flowing down when you’re turpsing off a bit they actually run through channels like a real mountain, they actually follow paths that are the same as the real thing; it’s almost as if you’re making a real mountain out of paint.
Is that what you meant earlier when you talked about your ambition for releasing those undercurrents of meaning into the paintings?
Yes, often when you’re looking at the real mountain there are suggestions, like music of other things, and it’s getting at those other things through the mountain that’s the important thing; and not sticking half way through. These new paintings are about the ground and our relationship to it, the grinding process, us humans grinding down mountains, the earth the land, people being ground down, all of us, they are about entropy really. There are no people in the paintings but they are haunted by a human presence. The Eiger and Honister in their different ways are settings for human endeavor, successes and disasters, one for recreation the other for commerce. You couldn’t really make these paintings without seeing that as part of the subject. 
Just for a moment I’ve been in a bit of an extreme state of mind, and I was imagining what the quarry is that we are looking at, (Ill opposite) non specific things really, but the recognition of it as quarry and the recognition of what some of the stone might have been used for.
Funnily enough, there is a guided tour that you can take inside the mountain, and where they’ve taken the slate away there’s a cavern which they say is large enough to hold St. Paul’s Cathedral several times over and St. Paul’s is one of the buildings that is partly built out of this stone.
Well! That presents a surreal image, one that comments positively on man’s use of natural materials, but I also know that it connects with some of your ideas about man’s casual treatment of our natural resources and the natural world which does seem to be increasingly threatened.
Yes. I don’t know whether painting can address these things directly, but I sense momentous happenings are just around the corner, and this feeling of foreboding must play a part in the work.
This conversation was recorded at Art Space Gallery, 1 August 2004 and subsequently edited by Michael Richardson.
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JULIAN COOPER at ART SPACE GALLERY