Herald NIXPrevious ArtistNext Artist

Two miles from Salmon Arm, over the railway tracks, through a cottonwood swamp pond I’m standing on the shore of the Shuswap Lake. Across the water the lights in town have switched on, the reflections are bars of color as you see on a military decoration. Overhead ¾ of a moon shows in the pale winter sky. It’s dead quiet. All the houses and the people that live in them; all the gas stations and motels you know are there; they all seem like a rumor now. There’s just the dark hills, the lights, the lake, the moon… And the longer you look and increase your awareness of what you’re seeing, the more you’re filled with an urgency to encounter what you’re experiencing further through the medium of painting. To be absorbed in that particular way that painting affords and bring into play all you’ve learned about the mechanics of composition and color, the language of paint.

After you’ve returned home, the paintings unpacked and you see if for the first time free of the context in which it was made. And it’s all there; the dark masses of hills, the lights and reflections, the moon. And maybe it’s good, this illusion of space, the familiarity of it all, but maybe what’s better is the paint itself. How the globs and swirls of color, in their immediacy have formed some thing beyond contrivance.

 Photo taken by: Robert Strah

Two miles from Salmon Arm, over the railway tracks, through a cottonwood swamp pond I’m standing on the shore of the Shuswap Lake. Across the water the lights in town have switched on, the reflections are bars of color as you see on a military decoration. Overhead _ of a moon shows in the pale winter sky. It’s dead quiet. All the houses and the people that live in them; all the gas stations and motels you know are there; they all seem like a rumor now. There’s just the dark hills, the lights, the lake, the moon… And the longer you look and increase your awareness of what you’re seeing, the more you’re filled with an urgency to encounter what your experiencing further through the medium of painting. To be absorbed in that particular way that painting affords and bring into play all you’ve learned about the mechanics of composition and color, the language of paint.

After you’ve returned home, the paintings unpacked and you see if for the first time free of the context in which it was made. And it’s all there; the dark masses of hills, the lights and reflections, the moon. And maybe it’s good, this illusion of space, the familiarity of it all, but maybe what’s better is the paint itself. How the globs and swirls of color, in their immediacy have formed some thing beyond contrivance.