Central Saint Martins graduate Alexander Heaton explores humankind’s most primeval interactions with nature through imaginative depictions of remote landscapes. Drawing on his own experience as a mountaineer, Heaton casts himself as “the lonely figure lured by mountains, dark forests, alpine skies and forbidding ravines.”
Read moreHis paintings reach into the depths of the imagination to capture a sense of the spiritual and the divine - those qualities long associated with awe-inspiring natural monuments. A twenty-first century Romantic wanderer, Heaton blends filmic realism with fairytale vignettes, to create an aesthetic full of visual wonderment. Yet, like all great fairytales, the sinister is never far from the surface of Heaton’s paintings: a sense of desolation and abandonment haunts the dark forests and crumbling glaciers in these unsentimental and complex works of art.
Quietly plaintive, Heaton’s paintings seem to lament our very human mortality, and seek to find beauty in the here-and-now, the passing ephemerality of life, and an escape from urban routine, back into the powerful natural world around us.
