VETERAN Lakeland climber Al Phizacklea is to open a major mountaineering art exhibition in Grasmere this month.

Lines of Ascent opens at the Heaton Cooper Studio on Wednesday, November 19 and will launch the Kendal Mountain Festival.

The exhibition showcases the work produced by artist William Heaton Cooper for the Fell and Rock Climbing Club guides for 50 years, from the 1930s onwards. Described as bibles for the climbing community, the books showed new routes as they developed, drawn on site and working closely with climbers at the crag face.

Phizacklea succeeded Heaton Cooper as the guidebooks' illustrator, and he once wrote: “Sometimes, at the end of a hot day, you get a moment of light from the sun that seems to make the whole view glow, and you realise that it’s those moments that the artist Heaton Cooper always painted, a beautiful ethereal moment in time.”

Meanwhile, pioneer female mountaineer and rock climber Gwen Moffat, now 90, has been paying her own tribute to Heaton Cooper.

Hailing his influence, she said: "For many climbers the first picture in their first home was a Heaton Cooper. If guides are now little more than reference books, the mountains are part of current living. They are on the other side of the valley, at the end of the lake and through the trees, and if all else fails they are in living rooms, on walls of halls and bedrooms in innumerable homes of mountain lovers.”

She continued: “Heaton Cooper is venerated, and not because he was a climber, a pioneer, a draughtsman and geologist, a man who understood the soul of rock; he was all of these and more: something between a realist and an impressionist. Light and texture are of his essence; water flows and cascades in his becks, whispers in his summer falls – you watch for the glimpse of a dipper. His rock is warm and gritty under the hands: feeling achieved by brush strokes. A sunbeam finds a hole in storm cloud to slip past the black bulk of a mountain and strike water on a shadowed tarn with a colour that is no colour but pure light."

Alongside drawings, guides and journals, the exhibition will feature climbing photographs from Heaton Cooper's private album, an Alpine sketchbook and also Julian Cooper's huge oil painting Eiger Face. The exhibition is curated by Julian, William’s son, and Becky Heaton Cooper, William’s granddaughter and Julian’s niece.

Lines of Ascent runs until spring 2015. For more, visit www.heatoncooper.co.uk