Lucas Kratochwil is comfortable with immensity. His large, realistic paintings of breathtaking mountain scenes don’t cede anything to more relatable, human-scale proportions. He doesn’t give the viewer a reference. He just says, “This. No [arms outstretched this time], THIS.”
The scenes are vast, and the detail, colour, and shading so accurate that they seem for a moment like a photograph. But then the viewer looks more closely and sees minute brush strokes. To study these paintings is to experience simultaneously macro and micro, the planetary proportions of the scene and the careful, painstaking attention in each brush stroke, on every millimetre of the canvas. We look across what seems a great and timeless distance only to be confronted with the flatness of the canvas and the painter’s human efforts. There is a lot going on in this dialogue between perception and reality that brings up what painters do: they push paint across a flat surface. Whatever they manage to evoke, depending on subject and scene, composition and colour, they are subject to their materials and just two dimensions.
In Kratochwil’s work, we are getting grandeur and humility all at once.
On his website he explains his choice of subject. “I want people to feel immersed in nature. To show them the might and beauty that resides in mountains, lakes, and valleys. I want people to feel what I feel when I’m in front of a mountain: struck, non-existing, in complete awe, inspired, and at peace.”
Kratochwil has lived and travelled all over the world, from the Andes to Austria. The third-generation painter started life on the family ranch in Patagonia and later moved to Austria where his grandfather, Franz Kratochwil, had been a prolific landscape and portrait artist. In Austria he studied design and worked in the film industry. The time spent in urban centres, after growing up in the wild mountains and forest, left him with an abiding concern for how detached so many people are these days from Nature. Again from his website: “We live in a society where we’re constantly obsessing with ourselves. We seem to forget we’re surrounded by life on this beautiful planet.”
His large-format, oil- and brush-work takes a great deal of time. Kratochwil finds many scenes and settings for his work where he calls home, in Roberts Creek on the Sunshine Coast. His goal, though, is to visit as many awe-inspiring places as he can during his lifetime. He mentions a few: the Sahara Desert, Antarctica, and the Himalayas. His strong belief in Nature’s ability to give, heal, transform, and amaze fuels his passion.
And, maybe most importantly, he says, “We all belong to it.”
