View of a Hill

There is something about a hill. I think it’s hard wired into a lot of us. A lot of people’s favourite walks seem to centre around the inclusion of a hill top somewhere on the way. I am no exception. In every place I have lived, I seem to have needed to find a nearby hill to which I knew I could easily get to and ascend, to feel truly happy living in that place. I can still picture each of them vividly, with affection, like old friends.

Hills are a significant feature in most paintings I do too. They either create the viewing point for the painting, or bound the horizon, fading blue and purple into the sky, like Houseman’s ‘blue remembered hills’. Often they are present as both, the start and endpoint of the painting if you like - the terrestrial part of it at least.

I suppose living in and depicting hilly landscapes there is an inevitability in their near constant presence in my art. As large geographical features, they are impossible to ignore whilst painting. Yet strangely, you could argue, they are easily missed when viewing the artworks.

What I mean by that, is that whilst they are there, they are rarely the centrepiece of a painting. As a vantage point, the hill beneath one’s feet is implied, its presence assumed, by the way the landscape unfolds into the glorious view that has inspired the painting. And whilst the distant hills that frame the furthest part of the scene are clearly present, their distance diminishes their presence on the canvas, often reducing them to an inch or less wide strip that merely forms a backdrop to the main subject.

Thus I often find it hard to let them fade appropriately into the background. When I am painting them, I am drawn into the detail that makes them. Fascinated by the sense experienced when taking in the scene: of wanting to constantly strain one’s eyes further in, to pick out the barely discernible details that make them what they are. The intriguing little fleck of the white wall of a farmhouse, the stroke of dark green of a small copse, the slight, little glare of an almost luminous yellow where a hay field has recently been cut. All these things intrigue the eye, but are a peril to the artist in a distant hill, as the more one seeks to include them, the more at risk of overwhelming the foreground and spoiling the composition those same hills are.

Maybe there are deep and primitive reasons for us being drawn to the hills. They were historically places of safety. To be on top of a hill is to be safe from a surprise attack. One only has to look at the placings of ancient hill forts in these locations to see that this instinct dates back a long time. It is not just an ancient habit too. It descends down through history. In Carmarthenshire, we live in a landscape dotted with early medieval castles, all of them dotted round on commanding hill tops. Each one climbed providing breathtaking and liberating views. (Or perhaps ‘oppressing’ views depending on your viewpoint on medieval Welsh history?)

For those, like me, who have spent time observing sheep, this primitive instinct, to seek safety in height, is highly apparent in them. All else being equal, an alarmed sheep will always run uphill, rather than downhill. A result that might seem counterintuitive, given how much easier it would be to gain speed (and thus safety) from a potential threat by descent, not ascent. The same sheep will always seek to lie up at the top, not the bottom, of a hill or sloped field wherever possible.

I think most of these traits are still there, latent in us. I’m not suggesting that our average walk to a hill top represents primordial fear. But possibly, a deeply ingrained instinct still associates such locations with a feeling of safety and security and thus triggers some kind of sense of calm in us that is hard to find elsewhere?

Then add to that a little of the effect I talked about in my last article – the ability to briefly glimpse our usual world from a changed perspective. The view from the hilltop provides an escape from the normal viewpoint by providing distance and height. It allows us to gain a sense of proportion of ourselves and our normal range of activities in the wider, vaster scheme of things.

Conversely the view of the hill (from the ‘lowlands’ as it were) gives us yet another, different experience. Our view across lowlands is strangely restricted. Other than the near at hand, most of what we see there are the treetops and roofs. When our eye roves this space and hits a hillside though, the scene erupts into detail, climbing up above the treetops and roofs is a kind of semi-vertical vista. Suddenly, on the side of the hill, we can see the fields, hedges, lines of the pathways, the profiles of the house and barns, individual trees. All seemingly somehow closer than the ‘lowlands’ near at hand, because of all this apparent detail.

Yet what we often fail to notice, from the hill top or valley, in real life, or absorbing its reflected image in an artwork, is the hill itself. By the hill, I mean the great hunk of solid shape and geographical mass that all this surface detail rests upon.

Pause the hypothetical motion of the eye from the overlay of all the details for a moment and really look at ‘the hill’. Take in the marvellous complexity of its contours, the subtle and gentle physical form that it represents. Often it conforms to a type, its broad base narrowing by almost mathematically predictable curves to its slender top. Different types of hill with differing geometries, that are classifiable (to those that are interested), but each one representing its own subset of one in its unique variance from that type.

The ‘almost’ mathematical curves provide insight into its original formation, its deviations from these curves tell of its own unique story. The strange anomalies on its face tell of its progressive and unnoticeably slow destruction; taking place, usually in geological timescales which are inconceivable in their extent to us. Other anomalies and quirks tell of human interaction with it: The banks of hill forts, the scars of mining, quarrying, lines of wear caused by ancient trackways.

Its simple brooding presence, that always has been and always will be there (apparently, to our eyes anyway) makes us regard it as unworthy of attention to our normal mode of vision.

Sure we ‘see’ a hill, but our senses are so taken with all that it provides - its vistas, its holding of a backdrop, the start and end of our landscapes, its sense of security and escape - that we often fail to notice, let alone give due credit to, the marvel that is the hill itself.