"Kissing the Cold Goodbye" : Nan Shepherd's "The Living Mountain" in painting practice: an ecocritical analysis

Leino, Patricia and Williams, Robert and Bradshaw, Penelope (2024) "Kissing the Cold Goodbye" : Nan Shepherd's "The Living Mountain" in painting practice: an ecocritical analysis. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This study examines Kissing the Cold Goodbye, a study in fine art practice-as-research that uses painting as enquiry into a literary text, The Living Mountain (1977) by Nan Shepherd (1893-1981). The research examines how Shepherd's extended walks and climbs in the Scottish Cairngorms manifest in her text, an interweaving of personal memoir, natural science, sense-perception and eastern philosophy, written from an ecological, feminist perspective. I apply Shepherd's concept of walking as access to bodily thinking to my own walks and climbs between 2014 and 2023 in Iceland, Finland and Scotland. Taking an autoethnographic, first-person voice, ideas from The Living Mountain are explored as a relationality with the living world more embodied than the landscape as merely a view. One point of issue is painting's lack of extended presence within ecological discourses, exemplified in a claim by Weintraub (2012) that painted representations of landscape offer little consideration of underlying ecosystems. The research tests and challenges Weintraub's view in contexts of anthropogenic damage to northerly ecosystems: melting glaciers, loss of seabirds, ocean plastic and industrial forestry. Painting, it will be argued, has a capacity to generate new relationships of body and place in response to experiential specificities: I am taking painting to refer both to a process of do-ing and a painting, an object that enters the world as art. Painting-as-process is presented as bodily thinking, and its physical outcome a communication of what it means to think in paint and painting. I draw on fine art-specific methodologies and theories of visual art as ecocriticism to re-imagine The Living Mountain from an ecocritical perspective. In merging artistic practice with ecological critique, Kissing the Cold Goodbye contributes to new views of The Living Mountain across subject areas of ecological art, walking art, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, ecosexuality, painting as mourning, ecological grief and contemporary painting practices.