Art & Climbing have sprung from the same source within me for the better part of my life. Each is a response to natural beauty and the desire to explore it. In that expanded moment a truth lives. "Truth is beauty, beauty truth," wrote John Keats.

The beauty in climbing stems from the idea that it might be possible to ascend, through discipline and creativity, a line on the rock or on the mountain which is drawn in the imagination. Our eyes seek the most graceful, tenuous, and audacious connections and we ask ourselves if we can follow that line.

"I like to express my capabilities and also my fears in my climbs... A good line on a good face is a work of art. It's like life. We live it and afterward it's gone, but there remains something, there remains a line."
—Reinhold Messner

I grew up in Wisconsin, heir to the traditions of the Green Bay Packers football team, but thanks to an orthopedic problem I couldn't run or jump. My mother taught me to draw when I was young and art has always been one way for me to interact with the world. Vince Lombardi's stoic philosophy is essential in a Wisconsin winter. When I went to Prescott College in Arizona I entered the magical landscape of the American Southwest and was introduced to rock climbing.

Here too my style followed Lombardi's tradition of 3-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust. I studied history, literature, and rock climbing. Professor Robert Bruce, Scottish, Oxford grad, and British Foreign Service officer for 30 years, became a mentor and taught eastern philosophy with a keen Scottish wit. Rusty Baillie, Rhodesian climbing poet-warrior, was a model of skill, cunning, and gamesmanship.

To sit in contemplation of a person or a tree or a mountain or a rock... and to lose your own sense of yourself in the act of drawing... is to find peace. It is, as T S Elliot wrote, "the still point of the turning world."

In both art and climbing I hope to return to that still point. I return to those conditions that hold the most promise for that lucid peace. Abraham Maslow names this a peak experience although the use of the word peak is meant symbolically. The association of mountain peaks with mythical or mystical transcendence is an element of what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious and so is shared by human cultures around the world.

Time and time again Western culture has found inspiration in mountains. The Greek gods lived on Mt Olympus. Greek gods and goddesses were capricious but Greek heroes had a sense of honor. They were tested. The oracles offered cryptic wisdom but it was through individual struggle and a sense of honor that each could fulfill his or her potential. In the 18th century English poets and artists expressed a social and political restlessness in images and ideas drawn from this spirit. This became known as the Romantic period. At the same time the Alps became accessible to exploration by those with the wealth and free time to do so. Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley all wrote of the Alps.

Painters too found inspiration in raw nature. In the face of the noise, greed, and soot of the Industrial Age it was the sea, mountains, and sky that allowed the northern Romantic painters, like Caspar David Fredrich, and the Hudson River School, such as Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church, to offer the divinity of landscape.

If you have been in the mountains, above tree line where the air is thin and time slows, then you know how well the world seems purified and we receive the grace to know it.

"To See a World in a Grain of Sand, and Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your Hand, and Eternity in an Hour."
—William Blake

In rock climbing, no less than mountaineering, these moments are possible. Our position in a vertical world is so compelling that our consciousness is raised. The calculation of risk, when safety is measured in millimeters, also produces a humbling attention to detail. The veins of geologic color and the perfection of a crystal both compose the mind. The grasping self must be let go in order to ascend.

"I have always been interested in things that require precision, where I have to concentrate and do one thing and one thing only. This kind of thing is attractive for me and I have found it in solo climbing....I feel the place where I am more intensely."
—Tomo Cesen

This desire to return to that peak experience state of consciousness is the source of both climbing and art. It is not always successful for many elements influence the fickle mind but sometimes, when sitting on the ledge after the difficult pitch beneath or the painting hangs up on the wall, the greatest contentment comes not from the sense of achievement but the sense of having been moved.

"...so it is not surprising that when an archetypal situation occurs we suddenly feel an extraordinary sense of release, as though transported, or caught up by an overwhelming power. At such moments we are no longer individuals..."
—Carl Gustav Jung

"I've had experiences I've called states of grace, which are a mixture of exultation and a quickening of reactions. These made me believe that anything was possible."
—Walter Bonatti

The sandstone formations of the southwest, and the uplift of Colorado s Front Range in particular, deeply attract me as a subject. The warm hues of the rock and the angles in repetition give me a sacred vertical landscape.

In painting I feel, more often than not, the same desire as in gazing up at a route on rock. My eyes trace the imaginary line from aspect to aspect and it has a purity. I think is too difficult for me now but I hope to return with better discipline. Sometimes I am able to climb it and sometimes not. So it is with painting.

I see aspects in nature and I imagine paintings. Line, color, and the sequence of techniques, all can emerge in my minds eye but the act of painting tests me. Composition is where I begin. Horizontal lines evoke a feeling of stability for me, vertical lines can evoke a sense of transcendence, and the most important are the diagonal lines which represent the tension and the struggle and the drama. Color is emotion. Light is hope, and sometimes hope is beyond emotion.

The news of the world is too often full of pain and sorrow but with the brush or the palette knife I can try to paint a newer world. Sometimes I am able to let go of the grasping mind.

"...but the artist himself goes back, after all, to that wisdom in nature which is embodied in himself, and this is not a wisdom built up of theorems but one totality, not a wisdom consisting of manifold detail coordinated into a unity but rather a unity working out into detail."
—Plotinus