West Coast landscapes take on new meaning at Steffich Fine Art

By Elizabeth Nolan - Gulf Islands Driftwood - July 02, 2008

Philip Mix and Dana Irving show until July 12

New work at Steffich Fine Art sees two artists with similar influences interpreting the West Coast landscape in different ways.

Though both Dana Irving and Philip Mix acknowledge inspiration by great Canadian painters such as Emily Carr and the Group of Seven, each has taken the spirit of these early landscape painters to create a unique interpretation.

Irving’s oil paintings of the B.C. Coast at first seem familiar in some way; when she jokes that they’ve been called a cross between Emily Carr and Dr. Seuss, you realize that’s it exactly.

Her interest in the dramatic contrast of shadow and light as found in local waters and trees is where the Carr influence can be felt.

Dr. Seuss comes into Irving’s stylized mushroom cap and curlicue trees, and the strange angles they bend themselves into. Though classically trained at the Victoria College of Art, Irving admitted that joking aside, she does admire the drawings of Dr. Seuss.

“They’re very well designed — and I feel like a bit of a designer when I paint,” she said at the gallery for the show’s opening weekend. Her “light-hearted” works are also strongly influenced by Canadian painters of the 1930s and ‘40s, but with a more playful approach.

A Vancouver resident, many of Irving’s paintings currently on display at Steffich are of Salt Spring locales, such as Fernwood Dock and Across Long Harbour.

Her fanciful, stylized landscapes contain an abstract edge, balancing the fanciful with the representational.

The towering firs in the background of Across Long Harbour, for example, resemble peaked dwarves’ caps, while the foliage of the arbutus trees is imaged as smooth lime-green domes.

In some pieces Irving brings more unusual shapes and colours into play, such as bright blue trunks with continuous ribbons of green threaded between them in Morning Mist.

She introduces candy pink into Bullock Lake Farm, buoying up a bucolic scene of sheep with some pink trees and puffy white clouds.

Mix also blends the abstract and the representational in his dramatic landscapes of jagged rocks, mountains, water and trees.

His paintings are even more geometric than Irving’s, making use of a fragmented field that mimics the panels of stained glass, assembling a whole out of many pieces.

Technically, Mix has been simplifying his style over the years and now works with a minimalist palette, often using many tones of a few colours.

Many of the paintings on display are of subdued earth and water tones, such as browns and greys, blues and greens. His very first layer is a burnt sienna shade, applied with almost a dry brush on linen.

Mix applies his other layers in a dabbing technique, which allows him to carefully modulate colour, and which brings some of the reddish brown through for subtle highlights.

Mix has much more than representation in mind when painting his landscapes; his strongly conceptual work is predicated on creating a visual language built on metaphor, emotion and dreams.

“This work is a lot about how we remember certain places, rather than how we see them,” Mix said on Saturday.

His titles reflect changes that occur in our state of mind, and how a landscape can have a layering of meaning for an individual.

Emotional metaphors within Mix’s paintings include “the sun which can become the moon,” “waterfalls that don’t look like waterfalls but can take us somewhere,” and the still water, which Mix said is about the deepness within.

“I don’t try to force them,” he said of the paintings. “I let them say what they want to say.”

Irving and Mix continue to show at Steffich Fine Art through July 12.

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West Coast landscapes take on new meaning at Steffich Fine Art

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