A Portrait of Rakaposhi Mountain

This painting is oil on canvas, and I based it on a plein air study I did from the top of a small village called Koh, in the northern regions of Pakistan, in the Nagar Valley. It takes about 2 hours in a jeep up a steep mountain road to reach the area I painted from, surrounded at high altitude by meadows, with views of the Karakoram mountains, including the peaks of Rakaposhi that reach 25,000 ft high, one of the tallest mountains in the world. I used my plein air study (30x40cm) to design my larger composition, staying as true to my value and color range as possible while scaling up the painting to 150 x 100 cm in my studio in Florence. Towards the end of painting, I felt I needed a small path wandering through the grass of the foreground- something to lead the viewer through the painting. I want this painting to not only act as a portrait of a powerful and recognizable place, describing a landscape that will sadly drastically change in the coming years due to climate change, but wanted the painting to also act as a metaphysical journey for the viewer. One can image that if they just traveled on the small dirt path long enough, they could reach the glacier at the base of the snowy mountain, perhaps even continuing on through the ice to reach the top.