James Hart Dyke: Patagonia

Following the success of Whymper’s Mountains 150 years on in 2015 James Hart Dyke undertook another intrepid expedition in December last year. He travelled to Patagonia in South America with two experienced climbers to explore, observe and record the mountain landscapes. The paintings shown in this exhibition are the result of the latest in a series of gruelling pilgrimages James has made to paint remote and out-of-the-way landscapes from the Himalayas to the Atlas Mountains.

PATAGONIA continues James’ exploration of mountain painting, and despite the distinct character of each new mountain range he visits, the interplay between the ‘realism’ of the seen landscape and the abstract design of the brushwork - the vocabulary of his painting - remains the central theme of his work.

In his own words, one of the principal aims of James’s journey to South America was to ‘create large spaces on small canvases.’ He intended to encase the spatial experience and the narrative of the landscape into the confines of individual paintings and the careful ‘box’ framing of his work has been carried out with that aim in mind. In spite of the limited dimensions of our first-floor gallery, we are nonetheless excited that James will be unveiling his first three-metre landscape painting here, entitled Void. In setting up his various camps in PATAGONIA James wholly immersed himself into his surroundings. In a departure, perhaps, from his more recent ‘Alpine’ exhibitions, especially Whymper’s Mountains, James veered away from depicting the mountains as the arena of conquest and folklore and to focus more on their savage profiles. Indeed, the work seen in PATAGONIA centres on just two specific areas, namely Mount Fitzroy and the mountains of Torres del Paine.

One of the world’s last great wildernesses, Patagonia covers nearly half a million square miles with a population of just two million people. Almost all of the territory lies within Argentina but Chile boasts some of its most beautiful scenery. From the time of the sixteenth-century explorers the region was traditionally considered the ‘Land of the Giants’ or big-footed dwellers, and yet the etymologically challenging name of Patagonia, derived from the Spanish patagon, has only added to the region’s mystique. Through books and documentaries our minds conjure - in no particular order - a world of deserts, wind, searing sun, abnormal rainfall, cold, glaciers, glinting rivers, bone-white, molar-shaped peaks, cobalt blue lakes, condors, crystals, tawny grasses, penguins, albatrosses, seals, whales and livid sunsets.

Starting with Ferdinand Magellan in the 1520s, the names of famous seafarers and natural scientists such as Drake, Anson, Cook, Fitzroy and Darwin have been indelibly linked with the southern tip of the American continent. They subjected themselves to some of the harshest conditions in the world and their accounts emphasize both the wonder and horror at the desolation that they encountered. The legacy of places called, for example, Useless Bay, Glacier Alley and Port Famine leave us in no doubt as to how isolated voyagers to Patagonia must have felt.

Today the lure of Patagonia is, conversely, that same inaccessibility - its sheer wilderness. Stirred by the writings of Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin’s famous novel, In Patagonia, John Harrison’s Where the Earth Ends and the classic film Mountain of Storms, tourists are now drawn to its untamed beauty. In the spirit of discovery, James is no exception and so he was prepared to walk in, climb and bivouac in some very unforgiving spots to capture his moutainscapes. Apart from a few episodes of very cold weather, one of the biggest challenges that he faced was the unrelenting wind and, as on his many journeys in the Himalaya and the Alps, he nonetheless pushed himself very hard.