This show Forrest was actually my idea and I was very fortunate that I invited four other artists who all said yes they would participate in this with me and so it's been an exciting ride. I've lived in a number of places in Canada and I love all of the Canadian outdoors, the mountains, the oceans, the lakes, but the Canadian Shield has a special place in my heart and I started learning recently about the Boreal Forest which is the forest we see when we're in the Canadian Shield but it covers most of Canada, most of Alaska and quite a bit of Russia and I've been worried about the environment and climate change and so Forrest was kind of the theme that I wanted to focus on and forrest of course are not just trees they are trees and ferns and birds and snakes and bugs and they are filled with life and sound and doppeld light they're not a thing that somebody replanted after we clear-cut and I think they're massively important to preserve they're they're sort of mysterious and magical and yet calming all at the same time. So these works are all trees and my focus with them really is I'm just very enamored of those walks. Sometimes when you're driving to a place in El Gaunquan or your friend's cottage you'll drive down one of those avenues of trees and the light is just filtering through the trees and you see you know what I think of as the rhythm and the music of the trunks and that's mostly what you're seeing here. So these are all multi multimedia mixed media works. A lot of them have collage elements in them acrylic paint they would have graphite so I'm drawing I'm painting I use collage papers I make the collage papers myself some of them are painted with multiple layers some of them are printed with lino cuts or gel plate prints or different different methods like that so I have giant boxes full of papers of every color and keep making more so and so then I rip them up stick them down and then I may paint more on top of that. Something I've started recently you'll see in this piece who would behind me this is mostly just paint this one doesn't have a lot of collage but it does have the word wood in it which during the pandemic I started learning teaching myself lino cut and so I'm gradually making myself a lino cut alphabet of three inch high letters which as soon as I got part way into it I realized was really an insane project because that's a lot of carving so I'm carving the letters as I need them and so this group is called tree one tree two tree three and the actual word tree is in each one although it's prime it's pretty obscured in some of them you you can't totally see it and there's things that should remind you of rocks and those you know those forests where you can climb up and and you're in the dark and deep but the light is filtering through this this one and one of the other pieces in the show called Durham Woods were inspired by a walking there's some wonderful wonderful wild places north of Durham County or may be in Durham County and I was in there in the fall multiple times when it's not really quite fall so you still see the greens those amazing greens but you're also starting to see the other colors and leaves don't really fully resolve for you so the only shapes it's you know there's so much light so much color blinding light sometimes that it's just kind of almost misty even though those are no mist this piece sumax again came from hikes during lockdown and just loving the way they dance towards the sky and and the beautiful beautiful shapes they make this work all for me it was a body of work that I created for this show so it's it's all very much focused on trees the design of the trunks of trees I do lots of abstract landscapes but this this group is was very much thinking of the forest and what the forest means and it balances for me the great beauty of the landscape with that tension of knowing that we need to take steps to preserve it or it's not going to be there for us I know that we're not logging in muskoka but I do think with climate change we kind of have this idea that that's all going to be there for us and I'm not sure it is going to be there for us I know that certainly in the Rocky Mountains a landscape I know very well those landscapes are incredibly delicate and if the temperature changes too much we will we will simply lose whole systems so balancing that tension with the joyousness of just loving landscape is present in all of this work