At first sight, the world’s second highest mountain seems to conform to every notion of the perfect, symmetrical peak, to every child’s conception of a towering pyramid of rock and ice. Indeed, from illustrations and photographs K2’s south face would appear almost stereotypical to an artist. The reality could not be more different when first encountering the mountain at Concordia, its most famous viewing point. James Hart Dyke’s title, Big Sky is deliberately ambiguous as the scale of the peak is extremely hard to gauge. In some respects, its size is quite unsettling to the human eye let alone the idea of translating that into paint on canvas. At 12 kilometres from Concordia, walking there can take up to 8 hours. The enormous wedge of rock blocks out the rest of the valley the closer one gets and on its right the Abruzzi Spur and the Shoulder jut out into the sky.

- William Mitchell, K2 Artistic Expeditions: James Hart Dyke & Vittorio Sella, 2026

See all the paintings in K2: James Hart Dyke at our London exhibition, which then travels to the Forte di Bard. You can also browse more works by James Hart Dyke or read his biography.