November 5, 2021 – January 12, 2022
Artist Reception: Saturday, November 27, 2pm – 5pm
Artists in Attendance
Lonsdale Gallery is pleased to present TERROIR, a dynamic exhibition featuring new work by contemporary Canadian landscape painters Jim Reid and Lisa Johnson, on view November 5, 2021 until January 12, 2022.
Seasoned painters, Jim Reid and Lisa Johnson have, respectively, spent decades capturing the passage of time over an ever-evolving landscape. Jim Reid’s signature rich densely layered forest scenes, and animated watercolours, are placed in dialogue with Johnson’s gestural atmospheric and vistas. What emerges is an insightful mediation on the reciprocal relationship between the painter and the land, and psychological experience of bonding with nature
Jim Reid’s latest series of work investigates how layers of time, cycles of growth and decay, are mapped onto the landscape. Working in multiple medias – acrylic paint and watercolour – Reid’s practice reveals the terrain as ancient, complex and constantly transforming. His paintings evoke a sense of awe and wonder.
Moving between thick layers of impasto, built up over a period of time; and quick immediate impressions, rendered in watercolour, coalesce in this series, highlighting how events in the natural world overlap and coexist in the ecosystem of the forest. Here, Reid expands his sustained visual exploration of natural conservation, and the shifts in our relationship with the environment, to critically explore the rates of change and epochs of time to which the land has bore witness.
In Johnson’s grand sweeping scenes, the destination flickers illusively along the horizon. Themes of journey and travel intertwine themselves throughout her paintings. She infuses her canvases with a sense of movement, revealing the rhythm and energy of the landscape. Johnson builds her compositions through layering atmospheric plains of colour with spirited gestural brushwork.
What emerges is a dramatic vision, filled with winding roads that cut through uthrough the landscape, and unearth the unique attributes and characteristics of the terrain. As an artist, Johnson seeks to conjure the feeling of being in these sites. With a keen eye and a practiced hand, she is able to marry controlled naturalistic representation with expressive semi-abstract sensibilities breathe life to her paintings.