The light, the water, the skies: Three Canadian artists share the destinations that inspired their landscapes

It’s easy to take the natural sights in one’s home country for granted. But Canada has a rich history of artists depicting our vast and varied lands in a new light. Here, three contemporary landscape artists detail the regions that inspire their work.

Steve Driscoll

The art: “A Light Stolen from the Sun”

The inspiration: Algonquin Provincial Park, Ont.

“Landscape is as close as we can get to a universal language,” says Steve Driscoll. For the Toronto-based, Oakville-raised painter, nature offers a place to escape, especially during times of stress or feeling bogged down by city living.

His latest source of inspiration is a three-hour drive from home: Algonquin Provincial Park, which Driscoll has captured in an immense and moody backlit piece that fills the lobby in Toronto’s CIBC Square. The painter says visiting the wilderness area — known for ridgetop views, maple hills, and lakes numbering in the thousands — sometimes feels like being in a “Road Runner” cartoon: an uncanny repetition of sights that’s easy to get lost in.

Often, it’s only after he’s left the park that a new vision will spring to mind. In the case of “A Light Stolen from the Sun,” it was the sun setting over Biggar Lake, washing the forest in red, that created a moment of magic.

It was a well-timed moment: Driscoll knew he’d have to create artwork nearly 11 metres high for the building, and what better than Algonquin’s towering red pines? The finished piece — which was a five-year process, from painting to blowing up photos of the work, then transferring it to glass — is an immersive experience that forces you to look up, Driscoll says. “The brush strokes open up and make you feel like you’re walking into [the park], and because your eye level is just below the horizon, you get this sense of wanting to go toward the lake and explore.”

Fabian Jean

The art: “Horse, Ocean, Boat”

The inspiration: Cavendish Beach, PEI

Not all of Montreal painter Fabian Jean’s work depicts landscape, but most of it is inspired by natural sights, both in Canada and beyond. “There’s no direct narrative as there often is with other paintings,” says Jean, who describes landscape art as open-ended. “The viewers can put themselves directly in the work and reflect on it.”

“Horse, Ocean, Boat” is not a traditional landscape piece — there’s a giant horse in the middle, after all — but it’s one that Jean calls seminal to his current landscape work, much of which explores seascapes. The painting was directly inspired by a trip Jean and his wife took to Prince Edward Island’s Cavendish Beach.

Even though it was the height of tourist season, the couple had a private moment to themselves on the beach and were able to take in the serene environment, one he calls “uniquely Canadian.” Jean experienced a sense of calm, safety and optimism looking out into the waters, a feeling he hoped to capture on canvas using warm, inviting colours.

The trip also encouraged Jean to think about the prominence and importance of water in Canada, hence his recent focus on seascapes. “Water can be a very emotional substance that [can explore] light and dark, how we feel in a moment and our relationship to nature itself,” he says. “It’s a basic element, but it can really force people to reflect [upon themselves].”

Niap

The art: “26.03.21”

The inspiration: Nunavik, Que.

When Montreal-based Inuk artist Niap returns to her hometown of Kuujjuaq, in Quebec’s northern Nunavik region, the first thing she does is sleep. She never realizes how exhausted she is by the constant bustle of the city, where it feels impossible to be truly alone. But in the north, there’s a quality in the air and light of the region that Niap describes as “a purity” that brings her a sense of peace.

That’s exactly what she’s trying to capture in her latest series, “Silavut” (Inuktitut for “our skies, our weather, our outside”), a collection of imagined landscapes inspired by Nunavik. “They are the feeling of being in the north,” she says of the works, which are painted on vertical canvases to illustrate the height of the vast skies as well as the land.

The pieces are more abstract than traditional landscape pieces. Instead, the artist is attempting to explore the light and natural shapes in the area, and convey the comfort she finds in Nunavik’s inherent silence and solitude.

Niap’s art is always evolving. One moment she’ll be focusing on traditional Inuit tattooing, the next throat singing, the next sketching. But she’s never spent as much time on one series than her watercolour landscape pieces. “Landscape is the longing for home,” she says. “This series gave me a good reason to come home.”

The Star understands the restrictions on travel during the coronavirus pandemic. But like you, we dream of travelling again, and we’re publishing this story with future trips in mind.