The Volunteer Executive Committee is pleased to present a talk by Steve Driscoll on October 24, exclusively for AGO volunteers.  (You can find the details in Holly’s post from last week.) Read what P&D volunteer Cara-Lynn Nisenbaum has dug up on this intriguing contemporary artist.

“Steve Driscoll is a modern alchemist. He transforms the base materials of urethane and pigment into ecstatic visions of the Canadian wilderness. Like his historical forefathers, the Group of Seven, Driscoll heads to the forest for inspiration. But rather than re-enacting the plein air sketching method practiced by Canada’s archetypal landscape painters, Driscoll instead mentally banks the images he sees — lakes and trees, sunsets and sunrises, moons and stars, cabins and campfires — creating a storehouse of visual memories that he brings back to his Toronto studio. There he sets about finding ways to make his unorthodox materials suggest those aspects of the wilderness experience that loom large in his mind.” – Barbara Isherwood

Driscoll’s paintings translate the magic and wonder of the natural world and inject fresh energy into the traditional Canadian landscape genre. Murray Whyte says “His practice is devoted to taking a creaky old convention in landscape painting and giving it a Red Bull jolt of invigorating energy.”  (“At the McMichael, the matter with size”, The Star/Entertainment/VisualArts, March 24, 2017)

In 2016, at the Angel Gallery, Driscoll installed a reflecting pool to double his painting’s visual experience for the viewer. “He created an immersive experience by flooding the gallery space with 2000 gallons of water, providing an escape to nature in downtown Toronto.”  (Leah Collins, “The artist flooded an art gallery to capture the wonder of the Northern Lights”,  CBC Arts, October 18, 2016) You can view the installation video here

Driscoll has shown across Canada, including a significant survey of work at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario, during the summer of 2017. His work has been featured in publications such as The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, Toronto Life and Canadian Art, and can be found in the collections of TD Bank, Bank of Montreal, Nordstrom, The Four Seasons, Seneca College, and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.

Read more at stevedriscoll.com