Almost a Mountain: Leslie Rice

Towering some 3,776 metres above sea level, Japan’s Mount Fuji is an ancient symbol of sacredness, endurance and transcendence. For Katsushika Hokusai, Fuji was the great constant backdrop of a world in flux. His Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji pit the eternal mountain against the fleeting rhythms of human life and a Japan transformed within his lifetime.

Half a world away, Mont Sainte-Victoire looms more than an a thousand meters above Aix-en-Provence. For Paul Cézanne, this immense limestone monolith became an obsession—a fixed point through which to dismantle and remake the very act of seeing. Across some sixty paintings, Cézanne transformed the mountain into muse, developing a radical new pictorial language and laying the foundations for Cubism and Modern art.

At around 286 metres, Castle Hill in Townsville, North Queensland is pretty big too, I suppose. It was known to the native Wulgurukaba and Bindal Peoples as Cudtharinga, and to early white settlers as Mount Cutheringa…until someone broke out the tape measure and found it was in fact just shy of qualifying as a mountain. It probably looked a bit like a Castle to someone, I guess, so it was thus renamed.

Sort of dominating some of the Townsville skyline from certain angles, it was of moderate interest to painter Leslie Rice growing up in this large country town or maybe small city. In Almost a Mountain, Rice uses the fairly large pink granite rock in the hope of tying together a handful of paintings that he says interrogate vernacular culture and his pictorial past: things that probably were important, at least in passing, to him. 

Almost.