PROVENANCE
Corporate Collection, Vancouver
Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Ivan Eyre, Ivan on Eyre: The Paintings, Pavilion Gallery, 2004, page 364

While Ivan Eyre’s expansive landscapes undeniably evoke the plains and plateaus of the Canadian Prairies, they are not representative of any specific location. The geographies are purely imaginative, fusing imagery derived from Eyre’s memories with subjective, symbolic visuals, with the aim to evoke particular poetic effects. The features that sweep and soar across the canvas were often dictated by the affective relationship of the artist during the act of painting itself: Eyre would generally have little idea of the structure or emotion he would want to evoke before beginning, and he would allow the colour and form of the landscape to be worked out while in the process of being painted. The results are both subtle and majestic, as his large-scale canvases of carefully ordered planes of space and colour contain surprising topological curves and harmonious atmospheric rhythms.

At their core, the artist’s landscapes are inspired by his memories of the geographies of central and western Canada and the United States, in particular the wide spaces of the Great Plains that encompass Saskatchewan and North Dakota, where he studied, and the prairies of Manitoba, where he remained most of his life. Because of this, mountains seem to hold a particular fascination for him, having first seen the Rockies rise out of the flatness of the horizon on a family trip in 1949. “Coming upon any mountain range fills me with a sense of anticipation and awe,” he wrote. “Amid such massiveness, I feel insignificant but simultaneously enlivened, for it’s as if entering the mountains will somehow alter my life.” Further trips followed to the Rockies and the American Northwest, where Eyre would derive inspiration from the hills, meadows, mountains and forests that make up those dramatic landscapes.

Certainly, High Valley evokes the drama of the lone peak rising from a wide flatness: rather than the imposing wall of the Canadian Rockies, here we are reminded of the solo peaks of Washington’s Mount Rainier or Oregon’s Mount Hood. The open prairie leads our eye to a soaring singular mountain, held at a distance and screened by a wide band of foothills. Eyre cites the experience of foothills as a favourite of his, with barrier hills acting as the transitional spaces between field or forest and the promise of mystery that mountains pose. No less dramatic than the lofty presence of the far mountain are the rolling hills and dense foliage that comprise the majority of the picture. Scrappy branches of nearby brush provide a sense of scale, while the hollow of a nearby plateau quickly gives way to the swiftly receding landscape. The stabbed strokes of paint in the foreground shrink into a pointillist haze as they get farther up the canvas and away from the viewpoint, before the foothills and sky are rendered in flat blues.

Likewise, an important facet of Eyre’s landscapes is how they seem to collapse the passage of time even as their spatial relationships expand, as frequently evidenced in their treatment of the seasons. Here, the fading of one annual cycle into another is marked by several distinct bands: burnt late-summer grasses in the foreground change to autumnal oranges, before the lowlands sweep away into a winter coolness and eventually the snow-dusted far peak. A ribbon-like path of grey-blue foliage loops and flows through the composition, stitching together these amplified spatial and temporal relationships and providing a narrative path through the scene. With its contrasting feelings of intimacy and immensity, invitation and suspense, High Valley takes on an almost sublime quality, a propulsive meditation on the infinite capacity of the landscape and the promises that lie beyond its borders.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars