Winter Paintings: the Figure in and on the Landscape An exhibition by Ian Penn

March 10 - April 3

This work of Winter Paintings has its foundation in the genre of a Figure in the Landscape. As an active skier, and artist, I was struck by the sensation of being a figure, immersed in and traversing a landscape as compared to the external image others would have of me, the traditional figure, in the landscape. I began creating diptychs, using the backdrop of the mountains around Whistler, to explore this relationship, the size, of the mountains as compared to our embodied experience of it.

Landscape painting demands a scale: for me, the human figure, in relation to that landscape provides the scale. I am drawn to this relationship and have tried to explore this within these works. It is the relational space that we occupy, especially in a grand landscape, with our body the measure of that experience, that I have tried to explore here.