Cory Trépanier

One of the country’s great adventurers paints grand vistas in remote corners of the Canadian Arctic.

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What does a guy have to do to get some love from the Canadian art establishment?  It’s a question that Ontario landscape painter Cory Trépanier – who has paddled around icebergs, fended off polar bears and coped with alarming swarms of mosquitoes, all in the pursuit of his art – must ponder. 

Trépanier, named one of the top living 100 explorers by Canadian Geographic, has made five expeditions to the North since 2006, visiting six remote national parks. He thinks nothing of lugging around a 120-pound pack crammed with painting supplies and film equipment. 

Over the last decade, he has painted stunning, rarely seen mountains, glaciers and rivers. He has made three documentary films and created a teacher’s guide to his work. His first coffee-table book, Into the Arctic, is slated for release next year by Rocky Mountain Books. 

But a show at a major public gallery in Canada eludes him. 

In a way, he has a similar problem as one of his heroes, wildlife painter Robert Bateman. Like Bateman, he is deeply concerned about conservation. Like Bateman, he has a facility for making – and marketing – art that strikes a popular chord. And, also like Bateman, big-name curators largely take a pass. 

So it seems fitting that Into the Arctic, Trépanier’s exhibition of some 50 paintings, is currently on view at the Bateman Foundation Gallery of Nature in Victoria. The gallery recently boosted efforts to show work by artists other than Bateman, hoping attendance will climb with a more varied palette. 

Considering all this, it's somehow apt that Peter Ord, the gallery’s executive director, exclaimed – “You’re a masochist!” – as he reeled off Trépanier’s many feats of endurance when he introduced the artist at a recent media briefing. 

It’s not that Trépanier hasn’t approached Canadian galleries. "It's been very challenging," he acknowledges. But he’s philosophical, knowing conventional nature artists face a hard slog with elite cultural institutions, and adding with a shrug that he can only sustain such a massive project if he remains true to his own vision. 

And it’s not like he’s not showing at all. The Into the Arctic tour launched in 2017 at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. After stops in Kansas, Arizona and Michigan, it had its Canadian premiere at the Vancouver Maritime Museum in 2018.  Then it swung through Wisconsin, Montana and Washington. Once it closes at the Bateman on Nov. 3, it will travel to the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, then to Texas and North Carolina until early 2021.

Trépanier worked for a decade as a commercial illustrator after studying at Toronto-area Sheridan College. He began shifting to his own practice in 1997 and eventually launched his first wilderness project based on treks during the four seasons along the shores of Lake Superior, with his wife, Janet, and their two daughters, aged two and five at the time. 

That project whetted his appetite for terrain where the human footprint is even lighter. In 2006, he made his first trip to the North, driving with his family to the Western Arctic. His subsequent expeditions, increasingly ambitious, included Aulavik National Park on Banks Island, Quttinirpaaq National Park on Ellesmere Island, and Auyuittuq National Park on Baffin Island. 

He is concerned about the impact of the climate crisis on the Arctic, particularly as international efforts to extract more resources gear up. While he generally visits new sites, he says a glacier he has seen twice over the last decade has receded markedly. 

Typically, Trépanier completes quick sketches in the field and then works up detailed paintings in his studio at home in Caledon, a picturesque community an hour's drive northwest of Toronto. Along with the sweeping grandeur of windswept vistas, the paintings  show a sensitivity to light, a quality that's not fully apparent in digital reproductions. 

The paintings have a historical feel. Looking at them, one’s mind drifts easily to the early artists who documented the unfolding colonial project across Canada’s southern reaches. At times, that sense is enhanced by traces of earlier human endeavour, as in Trépanier’s painting of the remnants of Fort Conger, established in 1881 by American explorer Adolphus Greely in what is now Quittinipaag National Park.

Trépanier likes to tell stories. He plays excerpts from a film that shows three Arctic wolves sniffing around his tent on Ellesmere Island. The wolves, more curious than hungry, eventually trot away. Trépanier, who wanted a good shot, let loose his best howl, hoping the wolf he was filming would turn. She did, and returned his call. “The echoes of her howl just reverberated down my spine,” he says in the film's voiceover. 

There’s something interesting about a man able to channel both the adrenaline rush of wilderness adventure and the patient focus of a representational painter. Trépanier emphasizes that he takes “balanced risks” and, at 50, trains to keep himself in shape for treks so remote that even a small injury could spell disaster. For instance, he decided to take a small boat to paint near an iceberg off Baffin Island, dangerous because icebergs sometime flip over, only because it had turned the previous day and he figured the odds were good it wouldn't flip twice in two days.

Trépanier is thinking about his next adventure. He’s vague about destinations, mentioning potential sites in a few parts of the world, and adding that nothing has gelled yet. But he’s certain of one thing. “I don’t want it to last another decade,” he says. “A decade is a long time.” ■

Into the Arctic is on view at the Bateman Foundation Gallery of Nature from June 14 to Nov. 3, 2019. 

Bateman Foundation Gallery of Nature

470 Belleville Street, Victoria, British Columbia V8V 1W9

250-940-3630

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