Artist Statement: Landscapes

All Canadian artists deal with landscape. It occupies our visual imagination, even if we don't actively incorporate it into our work. We respond to the early images of the Group of Seven that are everywhere in our culture - from calendars to coffee cups. Either we reject the traditional easel paintings, (which function as a surrogate window on our walls), or we build on their tradition, continuing the dialogue carried on between Kreighoff, Kurelek, Tom Thompson, Marc Aurele Fortin and their viewers. Margaret Atwood identified the land as a character in Canadian fiction. It is also the substrate of Canadian visual art. It's where we start.

Most landscape art is immediate. It is about a moment in time, when the weather is just so, the sky a particular shade, the light at a certain angle. Most of the time that is my concern. I take my box of paints and trudge off into the wilderness and sit and paint on wood panels, in the time honoured Canadian tradition. My project 'Help I'm A Prisoner On Flint Island' currently combines 44 of those panels to make a large grid piece, like a paint diary, like a quilt, like an Agnes Martin. It is a study of one island in Georgian Bay and I will continue to build it for years. My ultimate goal is a thousand paintings. I'll really know that island then. Maybe.

At times I will work over many days on a landscape; to layer colour, to study its complexity, to achieve a particular look on the surface of the canvas. These landscapes are a different sort, informed by the works of Rothko, Frankenthaler and the colour field painters of the sixties. It may seem odd that their huge canvases are the basis for small, traditional landscapes, but the same principles underlie both kinds of work: what effect does one colour have on another; what effect does a colour have on the viewer; what ideas can be conveyed through the palette?

I live in the basin of the Great Lakes, an area of snowy, damp winters and hot, sticky summers. The humidity in the air gives the light a quality that makes for beautiful, opalescent colours. Even the most drab, urban settings have a pearly shimmer to them. The palette is complicated. Nothing is crisp. Blues are greyer than they appear, and greys bluer. Painters have for generations gone to the south of France for the light. No one talks of going to Toronto for the magic of the palette. In fact, it is one of the great treasures of this part of the world. It is luminous.