'Mont Klamott' — Painting a Man-Made Hill
- peter corr
- Jan 1, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: May 25
This painting — oil and cold wax on canvas, 91 × 91 × 4 cm — emerged from a recent visit to Berlin and a sustained engagement with the Volkspark at Friedrichshain. The Volkspark is a large public space situated in the eastern part of the city, and it has a fascinating and complex history that I found myself drawn to as a subject.
Process and Materials
The starting point was a layer of cold wax with burnt umber and Payne's Grey, applied with brayers and sponges. The intention was to create an initial layer of rich, dark tone that would persist through subsequent applications — visible in places, buried in others, but always present as a structural foundation.
The control of depth and perspective is a key element in this work. I have used diminishing size and aerial perspective to reflect distance and space. Nature does not employ pencils and paintbrushes to produce reality, and I try to avoid over-reliance on traditional methods of application. Working with palette knives and unconventional tools introduces a quality of mark that is difficult to achieve by other means — less controlled, more responsive to the material itself.
The History of the Volkspark
At the end of the Second World War, Berlin was divided into four sectors by the Allied Powers, and the Volkspark at Friedrichshain fell within the Soviet sector. The reconstruction of the park was undertaken by the German Democratic Republic under a plan devised by Reinhold Lingner, the GDR director of landscape and park architecture. The rubble of bombed buildings was used to construct two artificial hills within the park — the larger of which, known as Mont Klamott, rises to approximately 78 metres. The name is Berlin slang, roughly translating as 'Mount Rubble'.
There is something compelling about a landscape that is entirely man-made — a hill built from the debris of destruction, now covered in grass and trees, indistinguishable at a distance from natural topography. It raises questions about what we mean by landscape, and about the relationship between history and the surface of the earth.
Working in Series
As with much of my work, this painting is part of a series. It is impossible to capture every aspect of a subject in a single painting, and with the potential outcomes almost limitless, it makes sense to explore alternative realisations of an idea or concept. Each painting in a series asks a slightly different question of the same material, and the answers accumulate into something richer than any single work could achieve alone.
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