JAN 23 — Nature has always been an inspiration for artists throughout the ages. Mountains, in particular, have inspired many regional landscape painters.

From China there has been a long history of artists who painted the many outstanding geological features of their physical geography. Some of these artworks besides depicting the shapes and designs of mountain formations in great detail also conveyed clear information of the various geological compositions of their landscapes.

One of the most well-known Japanese artists, Hokusai, from the Edo period, made colour wood block prints of a series of 36 views of Mount Fuji. The Great Wave of Kenagawa done in 1831 is one of Hukusai’s signature compositions of this collection of early postcards of Japan.

Cezanne paid homage to his boyhood home in Provence by painting the Mont Sainte-Victoire in Aix at least 60 times from 1885 to 1906. His devotion to a single hillock slightly over 1,000m in his backyard set the modern standard of painting and looking at European landscapes since the Renaissance.

He began to dismantle previous ideas of perspective and started to flatten out and break up his subject by using fragmented shapes, colours and brush marks. His paintings led the way for Matisse and Picasso and to Abstraction.

The mountains of Malaysia have attracted a few artists. Fung Yow Chork and Razak Abdullah are among the few landscape painters who got inspiration form the mountain backdrop of Kuala Lumpur, the Ulu Klang quartz ridge and Genting Highlands. Mount Kinabalu (4,101m), our highest mountain between the Himalayas and the Snow Mountains of New Guinea, has a devoted Sabahan painter — Benedict Chong.

Syed Ahmad Jamal, whose retrospective exhibition is currently at the National Art Gallery, has been moved by Gunung Ledang, near Muar, his home town, in Johor. Jamal has painted three artworks with that name. The first Gunung Ledang was in 1978 (this painting is not in the show), then Gunong Ledang Visited in 1992 and the last one Semangat Ledang in 1999.

One of the real pleasures of this major display is seeing the largest collection of Jamal’s work in one gallery. The added enjoyment is in viewing some of the large landscapes hanging together in the same space, especially those artworks related to mountains.

There are three paintings in this show, Endau Rompin (1985), Gunung Ledang Visited, and Semangat Ledang  that deserve a closer look. These three works share one common element, these are large (2m x 2+m) wall size acrylics on canvas. The images by the Chinese, Japanese and European artists in the past were much smaller in size by comparison.

But does size matter? In Jamal’s way of visualization, the size of his painted surface does matter. When you are standing a metre away from the painting, the scale of the artwork envelopes your field of vision; you are sucked into the subject like you were in the middle of the forest or near a mountain. However, whether the painting is large or small, if you let your imagination roam free, you may still conjure up all sorts of stories, noises, animals, plants, trees, rocks, spirits, etc.

Jamal’s artistic heritage is a mix of the East and West and certainly his mountain landscapes have its roots going back to Cezanne. We can see in Endau Rompin that Jamal was arranging in layers the various species of trees, plants, flowers and rocks to form a triangle pattern. There is also the surrounding sea and the starry night sky. This is not a literal representation of the rainforest but a semi abstracted rendition of the place.

In his next attempt Gunung Ledang Visited, he still keeps the three sided shape but this is a tighter framing of the mountain. There is no more surrounding sea but instead there are suggestions of inland lakes, waterfalls, valleys and human settlements in the countryside surrounding the mountain.

This time the bright vivid areas of colours take on a role of its own and were not painted to resemble any particular part of nature. He has taken one more step closer to a two dimensional abstraction and freeing himself of the three-dimensionality of the conventional landscape.

Finally in Semangat Ledang , Jamal has his masterwork of abstraction; this is a perfect union of inspiration and artistic ambition. He has climbed his mountain, so to speak, in this painting where he has symbolically come closer to the “soul or spirit” of the mountain.

There are no more any clear references of nature and the whole idea of the mountain has been reduced to a small white triangle placed at the centre of the bigger rainbow coloured triangle. What you see is just a joyful array of different brush marks, colour patterns and shapes. Stare at the painting a while longer you may perhaps be transported to the top of a mountain in your mind.

Mountains and their surrounding environment have and will always be an inspiration to many artists. Their paintings may not only refer to the landscape but may also have other allusive ideas like the need for a better custodianship of our fragile earth and its climate.

This art exhibition is a chance of a lifetime to see some of Syed Ahmad Jamal’s best works and it’s an occasion for celebration. If you can, try not to miss it. Exhibition ends at the end of January.

*The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.

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