SUNSETS ACROSS VANCOUVER
I moved to Vancouver in April 2000. I was immediately struck with how depressing the climate
here was for it rained continually for about three weeks with barely a break in the clouds. The
climate would eventually change to clear and temperate spring weather that reminded me of
life growing up in the UK. Then over the summer months I was treated to some of the most
spectacular sunsets I had ever seen by simply looking out from my balcony. To those of you
from the prairies this would be nothing new but I was from London and then Toronto where
such spectacular skies were a much rarer occurrence and easy to miss unless you happen to be
picnicking in a city park with an unobscured horizon.
Like many people I took photographs of the sunsets but the prints hardly came close to what I
had experienced seeing. A good or professional photographer with a tripod, exposure
compensation and various filters would have produced far more memorable prints than I could
ever have done. Now some twenty years later we have cameraswith incredible digital capacity
that can record a spectacular sunset in the hands of an amateur with an IPhone.
So why paint sunsets?
Photographs we carry are ubiquitous images and not often seen in a printed format. They are
mostly an endless “roll” of spontaneous moments stored on our camera phones shared with a
click and hardly viewed for more than a couple of seconds. It’s a poor substitute for being in the
moment watching a Vancouver sunset and seeing how fast and dramatically the sky can
change.
These paintings, seen at their best here under gallery lighting, offer a different viewing
experience, one that allows for more contemplation and perhaps an interpretation that can be
visually poetic notwithstanding that photography was used in recording the inspiration for this
series of eight paintings. The reference photos for paintings 1 and 2 were shot on colour print
film and for painting 3 it was B&W film with a quick sketch and colour notes made at the scene.
Paintings 4, 5, 6 and 8 were recorded with an old Canon pocket digital camera. Painting 7 was
done from memory bar the foreground which I shot in the daytime and then transposed to
dusk on the canvas without any photo. None of these paintings were simply copied from the
reference material, rather I have recomposed them to varying degrees in preparatory studies
with foreground changes and colour and tonal enhancements to satisfy my personal aesthetic.