Susie Leiper: An Infinite Unknown

… mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery;

… I have always felt … that the mountains of the earth are its natural cathedrals.

John Ruskin's words of 1856 could have been voiced by an early Chinese landscape painter. The Chinese painter sought to reveal the essence of the mountain, its spiritual depth, rather than its mere physical characteristics. Ruskin would have agreed: 'The aim of the great inventive landscape painter must be to give the far higher and deeper truth of mental vision, rather than … the physical facts'. Seeking a degree of mystery in painting, Ruskin admired the painter who could evoke an infinite unknown: 'We never see anything clearly'.

Ruskin's passion for mountains and for landscape painting is shared by Susie. She hopes that her inventive mountain abstracts create the sensation of mountainous scenery, a strangeness that evokes the sublime, an impression that suggests the infinity of things.

Susie's relationship with Ruskin began over twenty years ago when she used text from Modern Painters: Of Mountain Beauty to create calligraphic works. That fascination continues today: the quotations and the titles of all the works are taken from this book. Trained as a calligrapher, Susie also paints, sometimes combining text and paint, more often separating the two. Navigating between the monumental and the miniscule, she works on everything from walls and large canvases to small panels and artist books.

Susie exhibits widely and her work is held in a number of national institutions including the National Library of Scotland, National Museums Scotland, British Museum, Fitzwilliam Museum, V&A Dundee and the Royal Collection. Susie lives and works in Edinburgh and this is her seventh exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery.