Artist Statement

            The author's first year in the bush........................and first self responsibility!

As a geologist and sometime forester whose work over fifty years has taken me to many diverse settings around the world, my intense interest and love of the natural universe and the people who inhabit it have formed the cornerstone of my life. I largely paint landscapes but not with the intention of reproducing them, for I believe that no painter can ever adequately replicate or out-compose nature, nor reflect its emotions and power no matter how realistic might be the style of painting. Rather, since I have specifically experienced the settings of all my landscape paintings and their abstractions, I paint to relive the personal memory and emotions of each such experience as they are expressed by composition, colour and contrast, the three “C’s” that govern my work.

The Working Wilderness Heritage Series of paintings portray the wilderness as a working environment and is intended to not only depict my own extensive exposure to this environment as a geologist and briefly, forester, but also to provide some historical record of an important way of life underpinning Canadian social and economic well-being that is being rapidly transformed by time and technology.