It is hugely remarkable that Raphael Scott Ahbeng still keeps painting at his secluded studio in Bau after all these years, at the age of 78 and with a host of ailments, more recently gout. It is as if painting is a great therapy although it is his passion that keeps the white canvas filled. Form, composition and colours – the tripod structure behind his art, whatever the subject or medium. He has been practically painting since the age of 9, and professionally from 1990. It’s standard to peg his art career from 1964, when he took up an Art and Photography course at the Bath Academy of Fine Art in Britain, until 1967. But in 1954, he already had his first solo. Raphael is truly a legend, who is adept in painting in oil, acrylic and watercolours, besides drawings and doing cartoons for newspapers, which show up his humorous side. He had also been a teacher and radio producer, from a Sarawak Government grant to do a Drama course in London in 1973. In 1959 he won 1st Prize in the Shell Open art competition and was 3rd in the Natural Malaysia competition in Kuala Lumpur in 1991. In this work titled Sugar Mountain, which is not about any real mountain like the one in South Carolina in the United States, he turns it into a great abstract play of patterns, drips, trellis, blobs and with a large frontal part negativised to bring out the silhouette of its vegetative surface. “Sugar Mountain is an imaginary art piece that I so intensely took up, as humour. There are salt hills but this is a figment of joy, just playing around with shapes and colours,” he replied in an email when asked about it.