South Surrey artist Bortolo Marola acknowledges he’s on a perpetual journey of exploration.

Even if his ‘landscapes of inspiration’ – title of his current month-long show at Delta Arts Council’s Firehall Centre for the Arts – may be the familiar territory of West Coast scenes and European hillsides, the way in which he revisits them is a process of constant evolution.

His sure and vivid watercolours have been largely supplanted by equally sure acrylics; his palette has changed; the approach to shape and form has become increasingly loose and he is also experimenting with texture in bolder ways without letting it become a gimmick that overtakes the composition.

And, lest one be tempted to type him as strictly a painter of acrylic landscapes, his participation in the Ocean Park-based Larger Than Life life drawing group is also producing equally sure and well-observed figurative work – for which he has no qualms about returning to watercolour.

“I’m hoping to get more figurative work in my shows because it’s becoming pretty strong,” he said.

“I’m not afraid of trying different things.”

More than that, he feels, it is the obligation of an artist to follow his or her muse wherever it may lead, in spite of marketing imperatives that emphasize work as a “product.”

“Commercial galleries seem to trap artists into being in one genre and one medium,” he said.

“I think they’re doing themselves and artists a disservice by doing that. Artists should be left to put it all out there.”

The breakthrough into a more textural approach started with a recent painting inspired by scenes on the coast of Portugal.

During their last trip to Europe, Marola and his wife Judy visited that coastline and he took some photographs of hillside villages and rock bluffs which latterly formed the basis for one of his boldest simplified compositions – a study of massive stone forms to which cling a few white-painted houses and a “Don Quixote-like” windmill.

“It was two years ago that I took the pictures – the scene has taken a long time to germinate,” Marola observed.

“It’s an amalgam of three or four different locations with a very strong diagonal perspective. I deliberately altered the dimensions of the mill to suit my composition.”

But also striking is the way Marola has incorporated a medium to add three-dimensionality, evoking the sandy cragginess of the rock surface.

In subsequent canvases, which hew more to his traditional landscape themes, he has developed the idea, but always with the determination not to let it overpower the scene – Marola decries the tendency of some artists to use texture indiscriminatingly.

Instead, his effects are more subtle, using a dry-brushing technique to evoke the surface of grass on a wind-blown hill, for example, or introducing media to suggest the texture of wet lichen-clad rocks in the strongest work in his current show, an impressive dyptich presenting a panorama inspired by the west coast of Vancouver Island.

“It’s been giving me something I’ve been trying to find in my own work, something beyond the visual, something related to feeling, so that a viewer might actually be tempted to reach out and touch an area of a painting.”

And the current work is sure to evolve even further, Marola predicts.

“The more I paint, the more I want to paint, and the more adventurous and comfortable I become with increasingly edgier and complex work,” he said.

“I have a tendency to get bored easily, so I have to move fast.

“But that is what I enjoy most about my art: pushing the boundaries of my skills and imagination.”

Firehall Centre for the Arts is located at 11489 84 Ave., Delta. Formal opening of the show, which runs to July 31, is July 9, 7-9 p.m., with the artist in attendance.