This painting has had a life before this one. It began as another painting, which spent some time away from me in a Toronto gallery. When it eventually came home, I realized that it no longer felt like me. Rather than letting the canvas sit unfinished, I decided to begin again.
I started with the idea of working in a limited palette, inspired by one of my recent paintings. At first I imagined reds, pinks and greens, but the colours weren't quite saying what I wanted them to say. As I worked, the palette shifted toward rusty oranges, greens and blues, with plenty of Prussian blue, along with greys and softer blues.
Somewhere along the way, I found myself thinking about our recent trip to the far north of Manitoba, where David and I went to see polar bears and beluga whales. The landscape there stayed with me: great rounded rocks, smoothed over time, scattered everywhere across the land, with little pockets of wildflowers and greenery growing among them. In the summer light, the whole place felt both stark and full of life.
The painting became a kind of conversation between those memories and the marks I was making in the studio. I called it Ideas I had in Churchill because it isn't a literal representation of the landscape. Instead, it is a collection of impressions—shapes, colours and fragments of a place that continued to occupy my thoughts after I returned home.
