Although I have worked in different idioms and genres during my career, for over a decade Canada’s mountain wilderness has been the primary source of my inspiration and imagery, and the major theme informing my painting.

In 1998 I was invited to be Artist in Residence in Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland in the pilot year of that programme. This experience was a turning point that hugely influenced my career; my imagery in all media for the next several years focused on the dramatic geology that makes the Park a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Recently, I have extended my geographic scope, working in the North as Visiting Artist with scientific research teams: I have traveled to northern Labrador and Baffin Island with Geological Survey field crews, and to the St. Elias Mountains in the Yukon with ecologists as part of an International Polar Year Project. It has been a great privilege to explore in person and in my art a part of the country that is inaccessible to most Canadians but which nevertheless is embedded in our collective psyche, helps define our national identity, and which is now a prime focus for environmental, cultural, and political interest and concern.

Mountain and northern environments, immense and complex, have been shaped by great stresses from both deep within the Earth and across its surface. The geology has been deformed by heat and tectonic action and then ravaged and re-arranged by glaciers over millions of years. In extreme chronological contrast, current biologic and climatic conditions are changing with unpredicted speed as a result of modern human activity. All of this is in my mind as I work, in the field and in the studio. In my art I try to take in, understand, interpret, and share the unique geography of this country’s rugged wilderness in all of its extremity, complexity, and ecological fragility.