LANDSCAPES - PAYSAGES
The LANDSCAPE has always been part of my painting process. Canada, after all, is a country of landscapes. It is a country that produced many great landscape painters: Tom Thomson, The Group of Seven, Emily Carr, Reta Cowley, Dorothy Knowles to name a few.
There is the Ontario Northland, the Prairie, the West Coast images, made well known to us by these individuals. Having lived in every region of this great lone land, I too have been its victim, as a painter, succombing to its vastness.
But, I was never satisfied simply to record what I saw. Too often that’s what my work ended up being. What I was after, as with the figure, was to paint what I felt. And that I found difficult to do. Here was a challenge!
The painting at right gave me a clue. It was really an underwash for a painting, with a simple calligraphic brush stroke across to represent an horizon line.
The “prairrie line” has been with me since the 1970’s when I first travelled by train to the West. I’ve used it often in drawings and paintings to represent a ‘background’, but never so deliberatly as I have here. The sky and foreground (field of turned earth) are wild rushes of wash-in underpainting. When I had achieved this, I saw that it “felt like” what I had witnessed from life. It opened my eyes to what was possible: landscape as non landscape. Landscape as a formal principle of art. Almost abstraction but alluding to what we see.
By chance, I turned it upside down (that image too, is shown here). Suddenly, I was seeing - no, “feeling” - what the vast prairie in winter felt like, with snow and dark sky. I was on to something. It was the beginning of what I wanted in all my work - Essence, Simplicity, Flatness, Feeling - a denial of subject matter as the main focus, interpretation as opposed to the litteral, bordering on abstraction but retaining the fine balance without becoming an abstract painting.
RFM - May 2008
