View from the Point I (Sunset), acrylic on multimedia artboard, 2021, 11 x 30 inches, SOLD
Noon-5 pm daily
Visual Space Gallery, 3352 Dunbar Street, Vancouver, BC
Returning to Ships, Mountains and the Sea
When I arrived in Vancouver in 1992, I fell love, nay, in rapture with the landscape of British Columbia. Four of my first six exhibitions in commercial galleries between 1998 and 2007 were made up of landscape paintings of the BC western coast. In them, I explored uniquely BC themes and created multiple series of paintings that mostly, loosely, somehow fit under the title “Ships, Mountains & the Sea”.
I painted huge ships off the shore of Spanish banks, turning slowly with the tidal flow, while windsurfers, sailboats and seaplanes skittered between them. I painted massive cranes, dwarfing the nearby buildings yet dwarfed, in turn, by the coastal mountain backdrop to their mechanized genuflections. I painted the sunsets and sunrises over the seas at Tofino, Ucluelet, Quadra Island, Nitinaht Lake and the Vancouver Harbour. I sought to spark in my viewer the same ache of nostalgia/exhilaration of life that I felt as I wandered this marvelous landscape.
I have been an exhibiting artist for 46 years. I have displayed many exhibitions of my work. However, other endeavors allowed me to pay for my daily bread until 07:28 on October 27, 2017, when I left those behind forever. My wish had been to live at least 10 years as a full-time artist. Now, 3.5 years and seven exhibitions after setting aside everything to focus on art, I can only wait and see how many years the gods decide to give me.
Gradually, I am taking care of unfinished business. Ships, Mountains & the Sea V will be the first of three planned exhibitions of that name. I am reexploring old themes – hey, how many times did Cezanne paint Mont St. Victoire? I am now finally completing several series of works that had multiple unfinished paintings: e.g. Views from the Ferry (in Island Paintings I, II & III), Paintings of the Wind (paintings of Nitinaht lake on Vancouver Island – brilliantly colored kites and lake seen through the trunks of old growth forest – like medieval leaded stained glass) and Fear, Hope and Longing (works of Tofino/Ucluelet shore).
I have also posted a sampling of paintings from my earlier exhibitions Ships, Mountains & the Sea – I-IV – if you wish to look at works now in private collections.