Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Dallas, TX

Note:

Canada’s history, industry and culture, including its art, have been shaped by the landscape. For millennia, artists—Indigenous and immigrant, professional and amateur—have been inspired by the majestic beauty of this country’s forests, lakes, mountains and skies.

Arthur Lismer, who emigrated from England, was a founding member of the Group of Seven, arguably the most well-known and influential affiliation of artists this country has produced. Lismer took his first painting trip to Georgian Bay in 1913 and was a dedicated painter for his entire life. Lismer, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson and other Group of Seven members sought to express the spirit of the young country through its landscape, creating images in vivid Impressionistic colour and bold brushstrokes. Lismer’s "Two Trees, B.C.” is an excellent example of his mid-career style, during which he replaced Impressionism with rough-hewn and angular approaches to form and paint handling. His paintings of this time also feature tightly framed compositions that focus on details, such as this painting’s vegetation in the foreground and the sliver of blue sky peeking through the dense canopy of trees.

Although Steve Driscoll’s work is often discussed in relation to the Group of Seven, he doesn’t simply draw inspiration from them; rather, his paintings extend and contemporize their legacy. Like Lismer and his cohorts, Driscoll experiences the landscapes he paints firsthand by camping, hiking and portaging throughout northern Ontario. However, instead of packing an easel, canvas and paint, Driscoll carries a camera. Current technologies play an important role in shaping his practice conceptually. Driscoll documents with digital cameras and then uses the images to produce works in-studio, often at sizes Lismer could only dream of. Driscoll’s instantly recognizable layers of tinted urethane give the works their reflective screen-like transparency. By capturing and manipulating his source material digitally, Driscoll seems to suggest that it has become easy – perhaps too easy – for people to re-shape and re-present the world as they want it to be seen. But, then again, isn’t this what artists—Lismer included—have always done?

Bill Clarke is a Toronto-based collector of contemporary art (and many other things) and a writer who has written for ArtReview, ARTnews, Modern Painters, Canadian Art and Border Crossings. Associate director of Angell Gallery from 2017 to 2019, Clarke has returned to his previous career in healthcare policy and communications.