From my earliest years as a painter, I have used landscape as the focal point of my work.  Although rarely conventional, I consider that my approach to this most Canadian of genres will add to the rich history of Canadian landscape painting.

In the 1970s, I produced a series of landscape paintings containing surreal plant forms that represented human characteristics. These paintings celebrated the cycle of birth and regeneration.  In the garden paintings of the late seventies, the plant forms became more realistic and became metaphors for the human figure, both male and female.  These paintings are in various public collections across Canada, including the Canada Council Art Bank.

During the 1980s, I introduced a nude male figure into the landscape and the final painting in this series was one titled “Floating”. This work consisted of sixteen-canvas panels and was sixty-four feet long. It featured a nude male figure floating in the sky above a continuous landscape of the Banff town site viewed from the summit of Sulphur Mountain. This painting is in the collection of the University of Lethbridge. 

Through the 1990s I continued to use the panoramic format, but on a smaller scale. Canadian and Mexican locations as well as the western American states that were the transition between my studios in Calgary, Alberta and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico were painted on usually long, narrow panels of various metals—copper, brass, tin—or canvas.  These paintings are in various corporate and private collections across Canada and the United States.

In 1999, I painted a series of one hundred canvases, titled “Driving South” that depicted a motor journey from southern Alberta to central Mexico.  Each of these 6” x 9” canvases records a view from inside a moving vehicle, an increasingly frequent location from which landscape is experienced as we enter the twenty-first century.  Five panoramas of the states that I drove through were completed at that time.  This work was exhibited at the Atelier Gallery in Vancouver during the fall of the 2000.  Some of these paintings are in various corporate and private collections in Alberta.

Since moving to Kelowna in 1999, my inspiration comes from the landscape in the Okanagan and I continue to paint in the panoramic format, documenting weather phenomenon and my spiritual connection to this location in Canada.  Many of these series, “Lake Panoramas”, “Storms and Rainbows” and “Variations of Light”, all oil on canvas, have been shown at Wallace Galleries in Calgary and are now in corporate and private collections across Canada.