Terry Fenton

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Terry Fenton, "Long Division, Saskatchewan Roadside"

oil on panel, 8" × 39". Courtesy of the Gallery.

Opening Soirée, Thursday March 23, 5 and 8 pm.

Artist Statement

The subjects that have dominated Canadian landscape painting were introduced by Tom Thompson and the Group of Seven a hundred years ago. Those celebrated painters presented Canada with images of a True North, a land of lakes and forest that seemed uniquely ours. The Group’s fealty to Eastern Canadian nature went on from there to embrace the western mountains, parts of British Columbia, and the arctic—almost all of Canada. But it passed over the prairies, where I grew up, so to my eyes the picture was incomplete. Whatever capture that in many of my paintings. 

Since relocating to Victoria a decade ago, I’ve been drawn as well to Vancouver Island subjects. I’ve found that oceans and seashores here offer new challenges and new approaches to colour and paint. Yet I continue to paint the prairies, and from time to time I also paint the mountains. Why ever not?

Recently I’ve begun to abandon the traditional “easel picture.” I’ve taken to painting long, horizontal pictures from my common subjects, often with much land and little sky. I’ve come to suspect that the sky in landscape painting is often little more than a backdrop that has been included more or less by rote, a kind of taken for granted imperative. When sky was left out, I found that the land itself became more interesting and evocative, spatial development became more obvious and essential, nuances of colour and texture became revealing and expressive in a new and exciting way.