2007 – 2020
“Drive by Landscape,” 2003, is my first drive-by painting. I was doing a lot of driving on the Prairies from 2002-10: researching Metis sites and visiting Metis folks. “Drive by Landscape” is of a space between homes in the Garneau district in Edmonton. I also took pictures of flags, clouds, haybales, roadkill, and other things for potential paintings. And I shot thousands of photos of the passing scenery while driving. My cheap digital camera’s inappropriate created blurred images. The best ones became paintings.
Some of the Drive-by paintings are about de-romanticizing landscape painting. Most landscape painters work from photos, but the public often imagines that the works are painted on site. Drive-by paintings are clearly based on photos: you can’t drive and paint at the same time. I was also interested in showing the disconnectedness many of us have with environments we pass through rather than engage. Traditional landscapes are a window we are invited to float through in our imaginations. Drive-by scenes are blurred and unreliable, impenetrable, making us aware of the bubble we travel the world in.
I have a continuous struggle with abstraction. These paintings express the desire to create a balance between representation and abstraction. Many of the paintings that wound up in Another Roadside Abstraction, a two-person show with Monica Tapp, curated by Jeff Nye for the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina, 2011, have a landscape top portion and a copy of a famous non-objective painting below. I met Monica Tapp while we were at an Emma Lake artist residency. The woods their continue to be haunted by the shades of abstract painters. I wanted to show how those painters were inspired by nature and how their paintings affect how we see our land.
