At first, painting was not the plan. But on Sunday afternoons, Rachel and I began working together on small 5 x 7 inch canvases, just time spent together, making something with our hands. Looking back, I think those small paintings opened a door.

Then there were the trips to the Rockies. The long drives, the mountains, the snow, the lakes, the weather, the scale of it all. I spent a lot of time thinking there — about Sandra, about Stacie, about the people I had lost, and about what grief does to the shape of a life.

The Rockies didn't fix anything. But they gave me space and that's where At the Edge of Place began. I don't think of these works as views. A view suggests distance. It suggests looking at something from the outside. But these paintings came from a more physical and emotional encounter with place. The mountain, the snow, the water and the sky became ways of thinking through awe, vulnerability, stillness and reorientation. What mattered was not simply what I saw, but what the place did to me.

That is where the idea of the sublime becomes useful.

For me, the sublime is not just grandeur or spectacle. It is the mixture of awe, exposure, wonder, fear, stillness and scale that certain places can create. It is the feeling of being in front of something that exceeds you. In these Canadian landscape paintings, scale is not only visual, it's emotional. The mountains are large, but so is the feeling around them.

The numinous and psychological weather

There is also something in this body of work that connects to the numinous and I use that word carefully. I don't mean anything sentimental or decorative. I mean the strange charge a place can carry when it seems to belong both to the outer world and to the inner life at the same time. Some landscapes feel like that. They are real places. You can stand there. You can photograph them. You can name them on a map. But the experience of them is not contained by those facts.

In Canada, the mountains, snow, aurora, glacial water and weather often felt psychologically charged. They were outside me, but they also seemed to meet something inward: grief, longing, memory, reverence, and the need to make sense of what had been lived through. That's what I mean by psychological weather. Not only the weather in the sky. The weather inside the experience.

Presence and absence

One of the things I kept returning to while making this work was the relationship between presence and absence. A place can feel full because of what's there: mountain, water, sky, light, trees, snow. But it can also feel full because of what is missing, or who is missing. Absence is not empty and can have weight. A picnic table, a chair, a road, a sign, a burnt tree, or a small marker of scale can suggest human presence without turning the painting into a story. These traces matter because they place the human body in relation to something much larger, while also pointing to what is withheld or beyond reach.

• In Welcome to Alberta, the snow-covered picnic table becomes more than an object in a landscape. It suggests pause, rest, exposure, arrival and absence.
• In Sentinel: Elk Island, the burnt tree stands under the aurora almost like a witness-form, a threshold between endurance and vulnerability.

The paintings can also be viewed together in the At the Edge of Place Virtual Gallery, where the larger works, Mountain Notes and smaller studies sit in conversation with each other.

Memory changes colour.

A place remembered later is never exactly the same as the place seen at the time. Certain colours intensify while others fade. A sky becomes more blue than it was. A mountain becomes warmer. A shadow becomes more purple. The painting has to follow that emotional truth unlike a photograph. That is especially true in The Colour of Majesty, where colour carries memory across distance and reflection. The mountains are not only mountains. They are structure, rhythm, warmth, distance and after-image and I wanted to hold that feeling of what remained.

What the landscape gave back

I do not want to make the Rockies sound like a cure. They weren't. Grief doesn't disappear because of mountains, lakes, snow, or beautiful light. But sometimes a place gives you enough distance to breathe differently. Sometimes scale helps you carry what has felt too large inside you. And sometimes painting on a Sunday afternoon with someone you love becomes part of the same journey as standing before mountains and slowly finding your way back to the work.

At the Edge of Place

It is about what happens when place, family, grief and memory meet. When a landscape gives scale to things that are difficult to carry. When small paintings, long drives, difficult conversations and mountains become part of the same movement back toward making.

That is what I keep returning to in my work, whether through figures, landscapes, red skies, textured surfaces or memory-led colour. I am interested in what remains after the moment has passed. What attaches itself to us. What changes shape but does not disappear.

I speak more about the development of this work in the Artist Talk for At the Edge of Place, especially the movement between memory, grief, scale and the Canadian landscape.

The full At the Edge of Place Catalogue brings the paintings, studies and writing together, while the Virtual Gallery gives a sense of how the works sit as a body. I also speak more about the development of the series in the Artist Talk.