Guest Editorial

I first met Nandini in November 2019 at the Banff Mountain Festival, where she was a member of the jury for the book competition. We shared email addresses, and I later shared some of my paintings with her. We discussed one or two of them featuring in The Himalayan Journal.

One of the things that inhibited me contributing to The Himalayan Journal was the fact that I have never visited the Himalaya! I have very much wanted to, and still hope to do so. Such places however seem further away today. Even as the pandemic steadily wanes, the impacts of climate change are becoming clearer, I am finding flying harder to justify.

I started painting rock and mountains around a decade ago. I had a compulsion to do this, it was only later I realized much of it was driven by a need to connect with mountains when I could not be amongst them.

Painting is not a means of physical interaction in the way of climbing them that I love, but nonetheless enables me to feel mountain landscapes, something that calms me. The excitement and frustrations to be found in trying to capture a scene—be it snow on rock, reflections on water, the orangey-pink glow of a sunrise behind distant peaks—can be as absorbing as physically exploring a mountainside or rockface. Shapes, shadows and colours change with the light, mountains never look the same way twice.

I used to think I had to visit a landscape to be able to paint it. Light revealing the rich colours in a seemingly dull-brown gritstone crag at home in Yorkshire, the blue-grey, salt-worn limestone sea-cliffs of Pembrokeshire, the sharp-shadowed starkness of the Chamonix Aiguille. These are places I love, places I have climbed. But what of those I probably won’t? The iconic and legendary places I can read about and dream of? Increasingly through painting I explore places I have not been, and may never go, despite wanting to. Their mystery to me is increasingly becoming an element of the desire I have to paint them.

Reading Edward Abbey, in my mind’s eye I see the American West, the immensity of the desert he so loved. Naturally sculptured sandstone arches and monuments, their red rock against a blue sky, shadows and lines etching shape and textures.

I pick up a book by Stephen Alter and the Himalaya unfurl before me, their vastness beyond my current reach but there to be imagined, the sense of grandeur something to try and paint. I can refocus the yearning I have to visit them as inspiration for my painting.

Living through lockdowns helped me further to find other ways to go to mountains. I may never get to see the wonderous Nanda Devi with my own eyes, but I can read about her, talk with others who know her, paint her and write about her.

Roll forward a couple of years to autumn 2021. A lot has happened in that time, the Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating effect on the world. I picked up the email thread with Nandini, shared some of my thoughts and suddenly I found myself accepting her invitation to guest edit the upcoming edition of the journal!

This edition of The Himalayan Journal explores the question ‘How can we go to mountains when we cannot physically go to them?’, responding to pandemic lockdowns and the climate emergency. I am very grateful to all of the journal’s contributors for their work and dedication to complete their articles, stories, poetry, photographs and artwork.

We hoped our contributors would react to the question in different ways and indeed they did. Yash Veer Bhatnagar discusses the role of the mountaineer in citizen science projects that monitor Himalayan wildlife, Katie Ives explores the ways in which W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Virginia Woolf found inspiration in the ambiguity and tragedy of mountaineering, George Rodway discusses the impact of climate change on the Himalayan landscape and peoples. Three examples from a rich and varied collection

It has been a joy and an honour to work with each contributor, and with Nandini and Aparna as we prepared the journal for publication. Thank you all very much indeed.

HEATHER DAWE

September 2022, Yorkshire, UK