Finding Space in a Canadian Landscape: Creating An Oversized Painting
Canada has a long and celebrated tradition of landscape painting. Most famously, the Group of Seven helped define a distinctly Canadian visual language between 1913 and 1930, transforming rugged forests, lakes, mountains and northern wilderness into some of the most recognizable images in Canadian art.
Today, landscape remains one of the subjects most admired and collected across the country. It is hardly surprising. More than 80 percent of Canada is uninhabited, and at 9,984,670 square kilometres, Canada is an enormous country with a lot of land to gaze upon.
Perhaps our relationship with all that space has even shaped our behaviour.
Spend a little time in Canada and you may notice how much distance we tend to leave between ourselves and the next person. In line at the grocery store, at a museum, waiting for coffee at Tim Hortons or standing in a theatre queue, Canadians seem to have an instinctive understanding of personal space.
We are polite about it, of course. We won't necessarily tell you to move away. Instead, we may look sideways, raise an eyebrow and quietly wonder why you have entered our carefully maintained bubble.
I discovered just how deeply ingrained this Canadian relationship with space was when I spent a month in London studying at the Royal College of Art.
Learning to Close the Gap
London has more than nine million people, and suddenly my Canadian sense of personal space became somewhat impractical.
I had to learn not only to "mind the gap," but to close the gap. If I wanted to get anywhere on the Underground, I had to move with the crowds, sometimes ahead of them. I learned to walk faster, squeeze through smaller spaces and surrender the comfortable distance I had always assumed was mine.
It was an unexpected lesson in perception.
I had travelled to London to attend a summer contemporary art program at the Royal College of Art, partly because I wanted to disrupt my usual studio practice. I wanted to shake things up, experiment and see what might happen if I loosened my grip on the way I normally paint.
That experiment continued long after I returned home to Canada.
In London, I had been working on large, unstretched pieces of canvas, allowing the scale and surface to become part of the experience. My approach became looser, more intuitive and less concerned with the precise rendering that had characterized much of my earlier work.
Coming home, I faced a new challenge: how do you bring a new visual language home without abandoning the language that brought you there?
I think about this in musical terms. I wanted to make a new album without alienating the people who had been listening to my music for years. There would still be familiar songs. There would still be the greatest hits. I would still be painting Canadian symbols, hockey and the visual language that has become associated with my work.
But I wanted to introduce something new.
For me, evolution is one of the most important parts of being an artist. If we continue making art, we have to continue asking ourselves what comes next.
Coming Home to the Landscape
In London, I had been painting on large, unstretched cotton canvas, which offered a smooth surface and allowed me to work more freely. When I returned to my studio in Canada, I decided to continue with the large format and loose approach.
I kept my signature vivid colour palette, something that has remained consistent throughout my more than twenty years of painting, but I began thinking about what subject could carry this new approach. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found myself thinking about space.
What better subject than the Canadian landscape? It had been some time since I had painted a purely landscape-based work, and even longer since I had focused on the landscape of my home province, British Columbia. Then I came across a story about Princess Louisa Inlet. I began researching the area and gathering photographs from local sources. I sketched ideas on paper before transferring the composition to a five-by-eight-foot canvas, which I stapled directly to the wall of my studio.
The resulting painting would take five weeks and approximately 240 hours to complete.
Painting a Landscape, One Layer at a Time
Every painting begins a journey for me, and every journey needs a soundtrack. Music has been part of my studio practice for almost my entire career. I choose what I listen to carefully because I believe music affects the atmosphere of the studio and, ultimately, the feeling of the work. For the first four weeks of this painting, my studio was filled almost exclusively with jazz. During the final week, I returned to an old favourite, Radiohead's The King of Limbs, released in 2011.
The painting process itself begins with a sketch, followed by an underpainting that establishes the blueprint for the work: tones, forms, highlights, shadows and colour relationships. For this painting, I began by colour-blocking sections of the composition, applying translucent layers of colour within the sketched forms. These early layers established the foundation for everything that would follow, separating dark from light, warm from cool. Then came the repetition. Layer after layer, I essentially repaint the painting. Hundreds of times, in some areas. With each pass, the brushwork becomes more refined. Colours deepen. Forms emerge. The landscape begins to breathe.
It is a slow process, especially when working on a canvas this large. But there is something satisfying about watching an image gradually reveal itself through repetition.
The Landscape as Performance
There is another part of my studio practice that has become increasingly important: documenting the act of making.
For The Sound of a Landscape, I also set up a camera to record the entire painting process. Two hundred and forty hours of painting were condensed into a 26-minute time-lapse film.
Watching the video changes the experience of the painting. What took weeks to make becomes a compressed choreography of colour, movement, decisions and repetition. The landscape appears almost magically, but of course there is nothing magical about it. Behind those 26 minutes are hundreds of hours of looking, painting, scraping, layering, reconsidering and painting again.
For me, this is where painting begins to intersect with performance and cinema. I am not acting out the process. I am simply documenting myself being an artist in my studio. The camera becomes a witness. The painting becomes the stage. And the viewer gets to see a landscape emerge not only as an image, but as an experience.
Finding Space
There is something fitting about the fact that this painting emerged after my time in one of the most densely populated cities in the world.
London taught me to close the gap. Coming home to Canada reminded me why I love having one. The Sound of a Landscape became more than a painting of a beautiful British Columbia wilderness. It became an exploration of space, sound, colour and the process of finding my way into a new chapter of my artistic practice.
Perhaps that is one of the gifts of travel. Sometimes you have to leave home to see what home means. And sometimes, after spending time surrounded by millions of people, you return to the vastness of the Canadian landscape and realize just how much space you need to hear yourself think.
Watch the 26-minute time-lapse of The Sound of a Landscape and learn more about the painting.
Brandy Saturley is a prominent Canadian artist from Victoria, BC - now residing in Parksville, who is known for her bold, narrative-driven paintings exploring the iconography of Canada. Her work has been exhibited nationwide in solo exhibitions including she was also named one of Canada’s top 150 artists by The Canadian Art Junkie. Her work has been the subject of the documentary The Iconic Canuck and also created a commission for The Tragically Hip. Saturley attended the Royal College of Art in the UK and Emily Carr University in Vancouver as well as motion picture school in Victoria, Canada.
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