The first time I drove up onto the Tibetan plateau, I stopped the vehicle and stood outside for a long time, not looking at any particular thing. I was trying to understand why the space felt so different — why the ordinary experience of looking across a landscape had been replaced by something more like being looked at. The sky was low and enormous. The ground was the colour of old bone. There was no sound at all.
That feeling has never fully left me, and it has become the central problem of my work over the past two decades: how to make a painting that carries that quality of silence without becoming empty — that captures an absence which is, paradoxically, full of presence.
The Problem of Plateau Light
At altitudes above 3,500 metres, the atmosphere is thinner. This is a fact with direct painterly consequences: light behaves differently. Shadows are harder-edged and fall at steeper angles. Colours are more saturated — the blues deeper, the ochres drier, the whites almost electric. The horizon, when there is no weather to soften it, reads as a clean caesura between two absolutely different substances.
For a painter trained in the tradition of European oil technique — which is fundamentally a tradition of atmospheric diffusion, of light filtering through moisture — this presents a genuine challenge. The tools we reach for instinctively are the wrong tools. Soft gradients and sfumato do not describe this place. What the plateau demands is a more direct, declarative mark.
Over time I developed what I think of as a two-register approach: the sky is laid in smoothly, sometimes in a single session of wet-on-wet work, with the gradations from zenith to horizon handled in broad passes. The land is worked in the opposite way — thick, broken paint applied in short strokes that hold the texture of the ground. The contrast between these two surfaces in the finished work does a great deal of the descriptive work without my having to narrate it explicitly.
Scale and the Human Figure
One of the most important decisions in plateau landscape painting is whether to include figures — and if so, how. A figure in a mountain landscape serves as a scale marker, yes, but it also serves as a moral anchor: it tells the viewer where they stand in relation to what they are seeing.
In my paintings from this region, figures appear small and unhurried. They are never positioned centrally, and they are never depicted in ways that suggest mastery over their environment. The shepherd with his animals, the traveller with their back turned — these figures have arrived in the landscape long before the painting has, and they will remain long after. Their presence is a reminder of a relationship to land that is not possessive or touristic but simply continuous.
On the use of pencil alongside oil
Some of my most focused observations of the plateau have been made in pencil rather than oil. There is a particular kind of attention that drawing demands — slower, more structural — that suits the task of understanding rather than the task of feeling. I spend days making pencil studies before beginning a large oil work. By the time I begin painting, the composition has already been argued through and settled; what remains is the question of colour and light.
Compositional Silence
The hardest quality to achieve in these paintings is silence — by which I mean not emptiness but a kind of held breath. The plateau is not quiet because nothing is there. It is quiet because what is there is so old and so large that ordinary human noise simply does not register. Translating that into paint requires a discipline of exclusion: leaving out everything that would domesticate or explain the space.
In practice this means: no foreground clutter, no anecdotal detail, generous areas of sky that are not interrupted, and — most importantly — a horizon line that sits low enough to give the sky its proper weight. In the European tradition the land tends to dominate. In my plateau paintings, I try to give the sky between fifty and seventy percent of the picture plane. The land becomes a narrow, dense band of information at the bottom, and the sky becomes the subject.
This is perhaps the most significant way in which painting the Tibetan plateau has changed how I paint everything else. It taught me to treat open space as a positive compositional element — not as a background that needs to be filled but as a presence in its own right, as substantial and as meaningful as anything placed against it.
The paintings that have come from this are not, I hope, merely descriptive of a place. They are attempts to transmit an experience of scale — the particular vertigo of standing in a landscape so large that the categories of near and far, self and world, begin to loosen. Oil paint, with its capacity for both weight and light, remains for me the medium best suited to that task.
