The Making of Bakong Temple, Study I, Angkor, Cambodia. 2018
This image, and this ancient temple, will always have a special place in my heart.
The Bakong Temple was the first significant temple-mountain, symbolising Mount Meru home of the gods, built by the Kings of Angkor, and it seems fitting that is was the first piece that I completed in my Spirit of Angkor project.
I envisioned this final image on my very first visit to the Bakong Temple, as often seems to happen in my work. As I crossed the causeway that morning from the East, I marvelled at the beautiful symmetries, the sense of spirituality, of a deeper mystery, and felt the weight of the thousand years that have passed since this place was built. To my right, saffron-clad monks were milling around a brightly painted Buddhist monastery. With each step of my approach, I could make out more and more detail; the timeworn textures of the Bakong Temple’s sandstone cladding, the fierce guardian lions protecting the majestic stairway, all beckoning me upwards to the exquisitely carved central prasat.
Filled with wonder, I could feel the image I wanted to create forming in the back of my mind. Yet how could I make my vision real? How could I communicate my feelings for this place? The beauty, the mystery, the sophisticated detail, the stillness, the profound sense of time?
That day I explored the temple, sat and gazed for hours, and made dozens of sketches. In the months that followed, I visited the Bakong Temple many more times; in the intense Cambodian sun and in torrential rain, from before the dawn and until well after dusk, surveying each aspect of the temple in every lighting condition, watching the shadows play on the delicate carvings, each day sketching detailed studies and scribbling copious notes. I often found myself sitting alone, bathed in moonlight, listening to the cacophonous song of insects in the surrounding jungle as I contemplated the visual poem of the chiaroscuro scene before me.
It took me several years of dedicated research and experimentation to develop the new techniques that I would need to embark on my Spirit of Angkor journey, followed by a year and countless hours of painstaking work on the image itself, before I was content that I had realised my vision.
It is with great honour and pride that I present to you Bakong, Study I, Angkor, Cambodia. 2018.
If you enjoyed this article, and you would like to continue to share in my adventures, please sign up for my newsletter below. Since I no longer post on social media, this is the best way to stay up-to-date with my work.
Also in Library
What the World Remembers
July moved through walls, bodies, songs, scars, cups, pages and stones—ordinary and mythic things that remember what human beings forget. Across Angkor, the Odyssey, Tolkien, Vedic creation, Greek war and quiet domestic rooms, the Library returned to one governing question: when memory fails, what in the world continues to know us?
The Story on the Wall
At Angkor Wat, more than fifty metres of carved sandstone hold the Battle of Lanka. Rama is present, but he must be found. This Prologue to The Story That Became Cambodia begins with the monumental certainty of the wall—and asks what the finished image cannot reveal about the Ramayana’s earlier journey into Khmer history.
The Mouth You Gave Me
A spare lyric poem from The Vow on breath, speech, gratitude, and the received body through which every answer must be formed and released.
Continue Reading
If this piece found something in you, you may wish to continue the journey elsewhere.
On The Lantern Chronicles, I gather writings from Angkor, myth and legend, contemplative essays, and poetry — works shaped by silence, beauty, wonder, memory, and the deeper questions that follow us through the world.
It is a place for stone and story, reflection and vow, shadow and revelation.
You would be most welcome there.