We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jonathan Freemantle a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jonathan, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

I spent the week alone in a basic, beautiful and remote bothy in the Cairngorm mountains in the north of Scotland, lovingly restored by its owner, my friend Hugo. I was making paint from the rocks I found in the surrounding hills, which I ground and mixed with a water from the nearby stream and a binding medium. I grew up in Cape Town but in many ways this part of the planet has become a spiritual home. The weather is extreme, unrelenting, brutal at times. Yet there is also a softness, an overwhelming silence and a feeling of being held in a kind of inner sanctum.

I was there for a project with Cask88, to paint individual labels for around 200 bottles of rare whisky. My idea was to paint the labels using some of the same materials that are brought together to create the the whisky – making paint from the local ‘terroir’. Grinding the ancient, local rocks with the water from the same area that feeds many of the great distilleries of Scotland to make paint felt right somehow. I see the process of making art and making whisky as essentially the same; a kind of alchemical process of taking ordinary substances and transforming them into something beautiful and lasting. Each label has its own unique mix of rock, water, plant matter. Each brushstroke is unique.

Nan Shepherd wrote these memorable words in her brilliant philosophical meditation on the Cairngorms, ‘The Living Mountain’; ‘It is, as with all creation, matter impregnated with mind: but the resultant issue is a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is dead. It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.’

Being alone for a stretch of time I found myself noticing everything with an acute attentiveness, my senses sharpened by the silence. Each day passes gently with these basic activities: Fetching wood, fetching water from the spring, collecting rocks, grinding the rocks to make paint, stoking the fire, making lunch, a hike up the hill, reading, painting, making dinner. One afternoon I spot a golden eagle soaring high above and it feels like a sign. Everything takes on extra meaning somehow, takes on a numinous glow. The glow extends inwards as the days pass.

Then night falls. Nocturne. Being without electrical light for a week was wonderful. Gradually as daylight recedes the eyes adjust naturally to the dusk and the candle light. I found the gentle gradation of changing colour though the window particularly beautiful, like a slowly morphing Rothko painting. There’s something completely luminous about the twilight blue against the darkness. Knowing that the small light coming from the fire and lanterns inside the bothy is the only light for miles is magical. A refuge and a beacon agains the vastness beyond.

Nature is central to my artwork. Placing my body in nature always brings me back to the source of why I do what I do. Certain places have more significance to me, mostly because they are places where the connection with nature is strongest. Being alone in wild, remote places like this leaves a trace in everything I do in the studio and I’m always plotting the next escape. I’ll be back in these mountains soon and am planning to carry a boulder up a mountain on the Isle of Skye later this year, making paint from grinding the boulder at the summit. Again, painting the mountain with the mountain.

Jonathan, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I was born in Cape Town and at 17, was selected as one of five students from around the world to study at St Oswald’s Academy in London, where I completed an intensive, five-year apprenticeship in traditional drawing, painting, sculpture and geometry. My training at St Oswald’s included an in-depth initiation into meditation practices and spiritual discipline. These principles continue to inform my rigorous approach to painting and art practice.

I have been exhibiting internationally since 2007, with group and solo exhibitions in London, Cape Town, Amsterdam, Johannesburg, Madrid and Edinburgh, including a major commission by The Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg. I have also curated exhibitions in the context of Edinburgh International Fashion Festival, which I co-founded in 2012, and as co-director of Hazard Gallery, which I co-founded and ran in Johannesburg from 2015 to 2019.

I returned to Edinburgh in 2019, and have since focused on full time studio practice. My work is represented in collections worldwide including SAB Miller, Standard Bank, The Nirox Foundation and the private collection of HM King Charles III.

My current body of work – begun about two years ago and ongoing, is concerned with a relationship with nature and a spiritual process that is enabled by this relationship. With these works, I am painting in reverse. The canvas is dyed dark black or indigo. I then begin bleaching parts of the surface to reveal lighter areas. The process happens slowly, in many layers, as I attempt to encourage an ethereal light into the artwork. Finally I add layers of oil paint, either gradually or with extreme immediacy. The result is hopefully very open and suggestive of a numinous experience. The paintings appear simultaneously as portals and as veils and come from an instinct for a kind of light that I have felt all of my life.

To achieve the large brushstrokes and retain the energy I made my own brush for these paintings, it is so important to me that the circle has energy but also a freshness. Occasionally I add ground gypsum crystals in an oil medium. Gypsum is a very mysterious material; in crystal form it appears like quartz, but then it can be ground into a fine powder. It has a tangibly grounding presence. I’m certain that it has a positive effect on the painting.

I would say these paintings depict a sense of being, the feeling in the body, rather than the body itself. In this sense they are not figurative but embodied. I am trying to get to the essence, in all things; to get to a kind of singularity, or simplicity. These works feel like they come out of a process, and even then I feel like they come through me, rather than from me. So really all I’m doing is setting up experiments, working mindfully, and trying to get out of the way as much as possible so the magic can happen.

Nature is central to my work. Placing my body in nature always brings me back to the source of why I do what I do.
To quote artist, Lee Ufan; ‘Our body does not belong just to us. It creates a relationship with the world. And this relationship is the most interesting thing of all.’

Certain places have more significance to me, mostly because they are places where the connection with nature is strongest. In Celtic lore these places are called ‘Thin Places’, where the veil between this world and the otherworld is porous, where there is mystery in the landscape.

My main hope for my paintings is that they actively work on the viewer, in the present moment. My intention with this series is to share a physical experience of inner transformation, to give a glimpse into the inexplicable. I feel like I’m edging closer. Over the past couple of years, and more acutely over the past year I have found myself undergoing a period of inner transformation. There seems to be a global shift too. It began as a return to the first expression of my spiritual journey, a memory of being a child, full of wonder. And then; alone one day in the studio I found myself pulled to make a deep and spontaneous commitment to the ‘work’ – the work which is painting, but also this spiritual growth. The two intertwined. It was a profound moment and felt like a kind of marriage. Ever since then I’ve felt pulled by a kind of invisible energy that keeps growing. So the works are connected with this very much.

Of all the forms that I find myself working with, the circle feels the most powerful. It keeps coming back and each time with renewed energy. I began to look a lot at the tradition of the circle in ancient Japanese Zen paintings. In Zen, an ensō (円相, “circular form”) is a circle that is hand-drawn in one or two uninhibited brushstrokes to express a moment when the mind is free to let the body create.
The ensō symbolises absolute enlightenment, strength, elegance, the universe, and mu (the void). It is characterised by a minimalism born of Japanese aesthetics.

I recently read an interview with the brilliant photographer, Dorothy Bohm. In it she describes attempting to capture “poetic, mysterious, transitional moments”. This resonates very much. The paintings are not depictions of Spirit, how can one paint the invisible? Rather, they are an evocation, an echo, a vapour. They point towards a presence you catch out of the corner of your eye, just before it slips away.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Born in the middle of the pandemic, my ‘Daily Paintings’ project was my DIY punk-inspired response to a world in shutdown. To try and find a new connection, beyond the usual channels, I decided to launch myself into releasing a small painting or drawing every day on my Instagram @jonathanfreemantle. I hadn’t engaged fully with social media until this point so it was an experiment with an unknown outcome. But, knowing that generally anything that you attend to with care, dedication and enthusiasm tends to grow I launched in, initially I committed myself to making and releasing 100 paintings on 100 consecutive days and making each work available for 100 pounds. 100 days/100 works/100 pounds. The £100 amount was intended to be accessible to everyone, and thus removed from the rest of my practice. Instead of stopping at 100 days I continued on for another 500 consecutive days, finding the wildness of the project inspiring. All of the works found homes, many in far away places. Some of the ideas and techniques that I have loved most over the past couple of years have grown out of the experimental chaos of this project. I found myself with a global following of actively engaging followers. When I began the project I had around 3,000 followers, today I have nearly 18,000. So I have continued the project beyond the 600 days. I created a separate page for the project, and a new work appears on there every few days now, sometimes more regularly and other times less so. Each work is available for a month and then it disappears again. Follow @the_daily_paintings for the first release of new works.
I find that my engagement with social media has become more focused and I believe it has given a space for me to speak directly about my work, my inspirations and my journey as an artist. As for advice – Authentic storytelling, told in your own unique way will always stand out from the crowd, so find what it is you want to say and use social media as a space to share this message.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

A Mountain Is Harder To Climb Than You
Think

In November 2021, I undertook my most arduous challenge to date. I carried three stone sculptures, their stone plinths, three paintings and a mobile studio, on my back up to the remote ‘Bone Caves’ in the far north of Scotland. I set up a studio and completed the paintings in the cave, camping overnight. I was accompanied by a small film crew and my two sons.

My boys. A big part of the experience of climbing that mountain with an exhibition on my back was that they were part of it. I believe passionately that the more time young people spend in places like this, the better prepared they are for their own journey. And having them with me on that intense experience was so beautiful. They were my Sherpas, carrying the sleeping bags, food and cooking equipment. We slept in the cave that night, another first for that brave pair. All the way through they kept their spirits high, I was so proud of them.

There were many moments where the physical weight of what I was carrying almost broke my will, but the more I pushed on the more the mountain seemed to help. It was almost as if the effort was matched by a kind of grace that carried me on. The experience changed me forever, and gave me a humber for more experiences at the edge of my own limits.

The title for the subsequent exhibition ‘A Mountain Is Harder To Climb Than You Think’ was my son’s. I asked him what we should call the expedition, he came up with those brilliant words.

Contact Info:

• Website: jonathanfreemantle.com
• Instagram: @jonathanfreemantle
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Jonathanfreemantle
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlCQ9ekBSmw