I was interested in English and became a translator before starting to journey and draw mountains.
Once you hike into the wilderness, you can’t find the last one you want to draw: not only skyey summits, adorable flowers, and cascades, which would attract everyone’s eye, but dim clouds, trees, moss, brooks, serows, and birds such as owls and Siberian bluechats; in winter, a pile of snow on tree branches or a stub, wind patterns on the snow, an avalanche trace, icefalls, a strolling rabbit, and a snow-capped pinnacle projecting to the deep-blue heaven. It’s a source of happiness to sketch these things in front, but sometimes I doubt myself whether I could draw a perfect figure of any one of them in my life.
As I’m trekking into a height and making artwork there, I get increasingly aware that I must consider a mountain to consist of a unified entity together with the sky above, winds and clouds beating and shrouding the hill, water flowing down a creek, and plants and animals that rely on a small piece of resources there. In other words, how things change from one to another, what processes they undergo, or how all of them relate to each other.
And I’m also concerned about who I am, painting them. What I could do for nature is make a few efforts to watch, interpret, and draw their shapes, textures, movements and qualities. But it would be great if the mountains and rivers before my eyes share something with me or guide me to my true colors.