Setting: A quiet upstairs room of Pimlico Wilde’s Mayfair gallery. A reproduction of J.M.W. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire is pinned to the wall. Liora sits cross-legged on the floor, a black fine-liner in hand.
Interviewer: You’ve just chosen Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire. Why this one?
Liora:
It’s a painting that feels like it’s holding its breath. You’ve got this ghostly warship, pale and majestic, being tugged by a squat little steamer. It’s about transition, about movement towards an ending. For Fine Art Parkour, I’m always looking for paintings that already have a journey embedded in them, and this one has two. The literal path of the ships, and the emotional arc from grandeur to quiet.
Interviewer: Walk me through what you do next.
Liora:
First, I sit with it. I imagine stepping into that light , the way the mist might taste, the way the river might move underfoot. Then I take my pen and draw what I call “trace lines” over the print.
(She begins to draw fine black lines across the painting. One runs up the rope between the two ships. Another zig-zags up the Temeraire’s rigging, then vaults across the empty sky towards the setting sun.)
See here? I’d start by bounding along the wake of the steamer, it’s a natural runway, already painted in. Then I’d take a vertical run up the tug’s mast, leap across to the Temeraire’s deck, maybe hang in mid-air for a moment to match its stillness. From there, I’d climb her rigging, push off at the highest point, and arc into the orange sky. That last leap? That’s not about landing. That’s about dissolving into the light, like the ship itself.
Interviewer: So you’re almost choreographing an emotional arc, not just a route.
Liora:
Exactly. In street parkour, the obstacle defines the move. In Fine Art Parkour, the mood defines it. A Turner sky isn’t for sprinting, it’s for stretching, for suspending. Every artist I “visit” sets the pace and texture of my run.
Interviewer: And if this painting were the real, physically real one?
Liora:
I’d still take the same route , but I’d be wet, windblown, and probably shouting with joy. Turner made this space, I’m just moving through it.
(She caps her pen, the web of lines across the print now looking like an elegant map of invisible acrobatics.)
