Paintings of Individual Old-Growth Western Cedars
October 1-14, 2026
Visual Space Gallery, 3352 Dunbar Street, Vancouver
Noon – 5 PM daily with extended hours Tuesdays & Fridays until 8 PM

A friend and former colleague gave me a nudge last Fall. During a visit to my September exhibition, he looked at my landscapes with their foregrounds of ancient Douglas Firs, leaned back, and drawled, “You should paint old-growth cedars”.

I had plenty of raw material. On arrival in BC in 1991, I was stunned silent by the spectacular, solemn beauty of massive Douglas Firs, spruce and cedar trees – particularly in sacred places such as Cathedral Grove and the rain forest trails in Pacific Rim National Park. Over the years I had taken many, many photographs of ancient trees with no clear plan of how they might be used.

I knew that I wanted to make portraits of individual trees, not landscape paintings of forests. After several months, I had an epiphany. I rediscovered the remarkable paintings of Lucas Cranach the Elder: in particular, his portraits of German princes and leaders of the Protestant Reformation. He painted backgrounds of startling, solid color – chartreuse, blue and turquoise – rather than the traditional neutral layered grey.

This gave me the needed inspiration. I would echo Cranach by surrounding each portrait with pastel colours and stained markings to offset the dance of the trunk, the contortions of the great branches, and the energy and resilience of the great red and yellow cedars. I would forego foreground and not depict the enveloping forests. The series became portraits of individual ancient cedars with a strong emphasis on colour, texture and character.