South African Artist Jonathan Freemantle Transforms Mountains Into Art

Holy Mountain: The Art of Pilgrimage

The first thing you notice about Jonathan Freemantle isn’t the art or the work—it’s the stillness. In his studio, jars of ochre and slate dust catch the light like relics. He grinds his pigments by hand, mixing rock from Scottish moors and South African mountains into his paints. The result isn’t representation. It’s reincarnation. His canvases don’t depict mountains—they are mountains.

Freemantle grew up at the foot of Table Mountain in Cape Town, where landscape was less scenery than presence. His father’s studio was a place of reverence, filled with brushes and stretched canvases, the air heavy with turpentine and purpose. “I can’t remember ever deciding to be an artist,” he once told me. “It just felt inevitable.” Later he carried that sense of inevitability across continents, from the Magaliesberg hills to Rannoch Moor in Scotland, where weather shifts faster than thought. Those places—wild, remote, alive—are his collaborators.

In Der Heilige Berg (“The Holy Mountain”), his show at Cape Town’s Gallery MOMO, the metaphor became literal. Freemantle gathered pigments from the same mountains that inspired the work, grinding them into powders and binding them with beeswax, linseed oil and Damar resin. “The paintings are the mountain,” he told me. “All I’m doing is a conscious walk with the occasional glimpse upward to check my path.” The line could serve as an artist’s credo or a way to live.

The climb is constant. Creativity, he says, isn’t “on tap.” Some days inspiration rushes like meltwater, other days it’s a trickle. Still he shows up. “Even when I’m not inspired, I go into the studio. I make paint, I prepare the ground, I work.” These rituals of labor and waiting—grinding stone, layering pigment, washing it back—are what make the summit possible. “At the end,” he told me, “there’s a momentary glimpse of the sublime.”

In The Journey, a short film about his process, Freemantle is seen bent over slate, his hand moving in rhythm with the landscape. Light glances off his tools. Mountains rise and fall behind him like breath. It’s not performance—it is conversation. The mountain isn’t backdrop; it is the witness. Each gesture, each pause carries the weight of ascent.

His practice blurs the boundary between body, material and place. The rock he grinds becomes pigment. The pigment becomes paint. The paint becomes an atmosphere—dense with memory, weather, time. You feel it in his surfaces: the erosion, the sediment, the patience. His paintings hold geological time but also human effort—the slow, deliberate persistence that art, like climbing, demands.

Freemantle often references Joseph Beuys, who once wandered the Scottish wilderness as an act of renewal. There’s a similar faith here, a belief that transformation begins in contact—with earth, with silence, with the unknown. “The mountain teaches you humility,” he told me. “You can’t rush it. You can only listen.”

The Fallen Tree: Transforming Art and Material

Freemantle’s fifth solo exhibition with Gallery MOMO, The Fallen Tree, was created during a seven-month residency with the Hugo Burge Foundation in Scotland. He lived and worked in the former studio and cottage of the late Rory McEwen. The show was curated by Odysseus Shirindza and presented in conversation with a selection of works by Jackson Hlungwani.

During the residency, Freemantle deepened his relationship with nature. He began by capturing the late autumnal blaze in his palette, adding a new color each day. Soon he incorporated woodcarving. He was gifted a century-old cedar that had fallen during Storm Arwen on the nearby Marchmont Estate. Carving it in sections with chainsaws, grinders and hand tools, he then charred the surface using the Japanese Yakisugi method and finished each piece with beeswax.

“I love the alchemy of this process and the scent from burning cedar is incredible,” he said. “The Japanese still practice Yakisugi to clad houses—not only for the deep charcoal color but to prevent insect attack, rot and weathering. I love the way it looks.”

The resulting sculptures—Fire Totem (Forever Burning), The Tree of Unknowing, Out of Mystery, A Flame of Joy—echo the ascent of his painted mountains in vertical form. Freemantle draws inspiration from Jackson Hlungwani, Joseph Beuys, Japanese Zen painting, Gutai, Abstract Expressionism, African ritual masks, Italian Renaissance devotional art, totem poles, Celtic megaliths and modern sculptors like Isamu Noguchi, Lee Ufan and Constantin Brâncuși. But above all, nature itself remains the central guide.

“Much of my work comes from an urge to immerse myself in a devotional relationship with nature. To bow at her feet. Making this work has taken me into a quietly ecstatic state, amplified by long periods of being completely alone,” he said. “The work comes from inner contemplation and deep immersion in nature. I want the things I make to speak this language to resonate as much as possible with this awareness.”

The residency allowed him to channel the legacy of Rory McEwen, whose botanical paintings and devotion to the Berwickshire landscape remain a quiet influence. Through this lineage, Freemantle continued a dialogue about endurance, devotion and the intimate connection between art and the natural world. Each work—from the charred cedars to The Living Mountain, painted atop Beinn a’ Chrulaiste in the Scottish Highlands—exists in conversation with landscape, history and human effort. His exhibition, The Fallen Tree, was on view at Gallery MOMO from April to May 2024.

In Search of the Miraculous Through Art

Freemantle’s exploration continued in In Search of the Miraculous at Escat Gallery in Barcelona, which ran from March to May 2025. The title comes from In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching by Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky, recounting his encounters with George Gurdjieff and esoteric teachings. These ideas—connecting body, mind and higher energies—became central to Freemantle’s process.

During this series, he read and practiced these teachings daily, integrating meditation and exercises of self-remembering. “At times, the experience was truly miraculous,” he said. Moments of stillness opened a pulsating energy flowing both from within and beyond his body.

Each painting was built in layers of transparent oil, creating surfaces that resonate with color, light and memory. Background brushstrokes followed a methodical rhythm—vertical, horizontal, vertical—laid in contemplation. The large strokes on the surface arose from deep stillness, executed with oversized brushes he made himself from natural hair and long handles. Before each stroke, he meditated for at least thirty minutes, waiting for the energy to arrive, then moved without thought, in precise, spontaneous gestures.

The resulting works—We Are Food for the Moon (I, II & III), A Sudden Glimpse Into Much Deeper Things, Drinking at the River of Light, Heart Without Measure—pulsed with the energy of his body in dialogue with the earth. The pigments were often drawn from ground mountain rock, embedding the landscape into the act of painting. The rhythm of repetition, the alchemy of material and motion, became the medium itself.

Communion and Awareness: Art in Connection With Life

For all their grandeur, his works resist spectacle. They are meditations—on endurance, on the thin air of transcendence, on what happens when we stop trying to conquer and instead begin to commune. Watching him, you realize the metaphor isn’t about altitude at all. It’s about awareness. The mountain, in Freemantle’s world, is not something to climb but something to become.

Freemantle’s work feels particularly relevant now, in an age obsessed with speed and output. His approach reminds us that mastery is not a sprint, but an ascent. There are no shortcuts in the climb—only patience, process and faith in repetition. Each layer of pigment, each mark of erosion, speaks to the long game of creativity. “You don’t arrive at the summit by force,” he told me. “You arrive by listening.”

That’s a lesson that stretches beyond the studio. The entrepreneurs, designers and founders shaping the new cultural economy are, in their own way, mountaineers. They work through fog, through fatigue, through doubt. The climb demands clarity, but also surrender—the humility to let process guide outcome. Freemantle’s practice isn’t just about art. It’s about the kind of resilience that defines all real creation.

In his world, the mountain stands for something larger than struggle. It is persistence made visible. It’s proof that transformation doesn’t come from conquering the landscape, but from belonging to it.

And maybe that’s what we’re all after: the quiet revelation that the summit isn’t a place. It’s a moment—fleeting, luminous—when the art, or the work, the body and the mountain finally move as one.