VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

This body of work came out of a journey through Canada, especially Alberta, where certain places stayed with me long after I had left them. These paintings are not really travel pictures. They grew out of memory, weather, scale, and that feeling of being held inside something much bigger than me.

This project started after a difficult time in my life. After mam died, I needed to get away so I travelled first to Crete and then on to Canada to visit family. As I moved further west through the landscape, something shifted in me over the months. I didn’t go there expecting to make a major body of work, but that’s really where the paintings began.

WELCOME TO ALBERTA

I think of this painting as the prologue. We stopped because I saw a burst of bright yellow light catch the snow and the picnic table in a way that just felt unreal. By the time we pulled in, it was gone. I painted it because that moment stayed with me, and because the bench added something quietly human in this landscape.

This close view matters, because it brings the painting back to touch, surface and human scale. There's nothing really special about a bench at the side of a road, but in that light and at that moment it became something symbolic. It helped me realise that small human structures could carry presence inside a much bigger landscape.

ICEFIELDS: 50 MAX

This was one of the first paintings where I felt the work really start to find itself. I was working from photographs, sketchbooks and my notes, but what stayed with me from that day was not the literal weather. It was the feeling of cold, distance, and stillness. I wanted the colour to carry that memory rather than simply describe the scene.

The small sign became really important here. It is easy to miss, but for me it holds the whole idea. A human limit. A small instruction. Something measured set against a landscape that feels so vast and indifferent. That contrast between human trace and physical immensity became one of the key threads in this work.

Sentinel: Elk Island

This painting came out of my very first experience of the aurora borealis. It was freezing cold that night, and the sky felt so alive. I wanted this one to move away from the mountain motif and into something more solitary. The burnt tree became a kind of witness form, standing there in the cold under a sky that felt both beautiful and slightly unsettling. I wondered how many bison, and how many amazing skies, it had seen in its life.

What mattered to me here was endurance. The tree is scarred, burnt, yet upright, and still holds presence. The light around it kept shifting, but the form itself holds. This painting changed the psychological register of the series for me. It showed me that stillness can feel charged, and that a landscape can carry presence without needing spectacle.

Athabasca Rising

Athabasca Rising opened the work out again. After the narrower focus of Sentinel, I wanted more breath and more space. What interested me here was the mountain as a steady, enduring presence, held against water, shoreline, and sky. I was trying to let awe settle into structure rather than into too much literal description.

Editing was key here. I wanted to hold the eye inside the image without over-explaining everything. It became a way of thinking about hierarchy, about where the painting needed to speak clearly, and where it needed more space.

CATHEDRAL RISING

This is probably the emotional centre of the whole series. It came out of a visit to Lake Louise, but it is really painted from memory and feeling. At some point the mountain stopped reading as just a mountain and began to feel architectural, almost devotional. I started thinking about the warm, ochre-toned cathedrals I’ve seen across Europe, and that is where the title came from. It felt like a place of awe, stillness, and reverence.

The painting carries grief as well as wonder. Standing there, I found myself thinking about family members who are no longer here, and about how much they would have loved this place. The warmth in the mountain against the colder blues around it became an emotional structure for the painting.

THE COLOUR OF MAJESTY

This painting brought a different kind of challenge. It is wider, more panoramic, and more open. I wanted colour to do more of the work here, especially through the long mountain range and the reflective water. At the same time, I was trying not to let it slip into something just scenic. The challenge was to keep the feeling alive.

Colour became a way of holding memory rather than just recording the appearance. What I was after here was not a perfect transcription of place, but an after-image. Something remembered through sensation. This painting really pushed me, where too much information could easily flatten the whole thing.

PURPLE MOUNTAINS

Alongside the larger paintings, I made smaller grouped works like these. They let me test form, repetition, colour, and rhythm in a more direct way. I think of them almost as mountain notes. They are less tied to one exact place, and more to the way memory fades but at the same time sharpens what stays with you over time.

RED MOUNTAINS

These serial works were important because they stripped things back. Change the colour. Shift the shape slightly. Repeat the motif. You begin to see more clearly what is carrying the image and what is not. Development is not always about making something bigger or more detailed. Sometimes it is about repeating, refining, and taking notice.

WEATHER NOTES I - III

The blue group feels quieter and more inward to me. These small pieces are less about a declaration and more atmospheric. They are closer to weather, fragments, and sensations held onto. I wanted them shown together because they read as a pause in the sequence, almost like a breath before the final painting, or a softer register of memory.

PYRAMID LAKE, RACHEL

I think of this as the epilogue. It brings human presence into the work in a more direct way. It was inspired by my niece Rachel, which is why her name is in the title. After the scale and stillness of the other paintings, this one closes the sequence with closeness, warmth, and memory. It belongs to the same journey, but it lands differently.

What mattered here was not just place, but presence. The chairs, the figure, the dock, and the mountain all hold different kinds of stillness. It is quieter in a different way from the sublime works. More personal. More held. It reminds me that landscape can be a space of relationship as much as distance.

CLOSING REFLECTION

Looking back across the series, what connects these paintings is not one fixed view of landscape, but the way I met place through memory, weather, and feeling. I became less interested in describing what I saw and more interested in holding onto what remained.

At the Edge of Place feels like the right title for this body of work because these paintings all sit on a threshold. Between looking and remembering. Between presence and distance. Between the human and the vast. This doesn’t really feel like the end of the project for me. It feels more like the beginning of a new direction.