Tilicho Lake

Tilicho Lake lies at roughly 4,900 metres in the Annapurna range of Nepal, ringed by glacial moraine and frequently cited as one of the highest large bodies of water in the world. In Summers' rendering the lake typically becomes a flat, luminous plane of saturated colour set against the angled facets of the surrounding peaks. The composition would draw on the broad, simplified shapes that characterise his Himalayan prints: large unbroken fields of pigment, a high horizon, and the sky pressed close to the upper edge of the sheet. Summers built the print without a press, laying inked plywood blocks face-up beneath the paper and rubbing by hand, then spraying solvent through the back of the sheet so that pigment migrated outward in soft halations along each shape's contour. The effect sits closer to staining than printing, and gives the snow lines and water edges a vaporous quality. Tilicho Lake belongs to the same 1980s Nepal cycle as Kali Gandaki and Pavilion at Gorka, and is among the works that established his reputation as a colour woodcut artist working in a contemplative, post-Romantic register.