Peter Gynd: 10989 Dunlop Road

In Dialogue
Peter Gynd, Figures which do not behave within the structure of a Story, 2023, oil on linen, 48 x 36 inches

10989 Dunlop Road features Peter Gynd’s recent oil paintings, inspired by the tranquil garden of his mother’s home in kwekwenis (Lang Bay), British Columbia. This series captures the shifting essence of cedar and fir trees that stand at the garden’s entrance, embodying themes of rebirth and spiritual renewal. Each painting serves as a reflection of Gynd’s connection to this place of refuge during a pivotal time.

The exhibition showcases a thoughtful selection of works, emphasizing a special set of 30 paintings crafted on-site during the warmer and cooler months of 2023. Through a range of scales, from detailed plein air studies to expansive abstract studio creations, Gynd offers viewers a deep dive into the garden’s transformative beauty. His use of vibrant colors and dynamic compositions invites an immersive experience into the landscape, highlighting the garden as a symbol of growth, care, and the mystical connections found within nature.

You focus in this body of work on your mother’s garden in kwekwenis (Lang Bay), British Columbia. The title is literally the address. The text for the show says that the place became a refuge during COVID, a place of growth, rebirth, and care. You made over 60 paintings where a large fir is ever present in each scene. Why trees, and why these specific trees? What do the iteration and repetition mean to you?

My practice has been focused on landscape for the last 16 years now. For many of these years, the work was a more conceptual exploration of landscape. This took the form of cloaked or blanketed figures, abstracted symbolism, and performance for the camera. In recent years, though, I’ve shifted back to more directly representational paintings, and trees have become a major focus of this work.

This focus on trees began with a series of stump paintings in late 2020 and early 2021. The cedar stumps I was referencing—scattered throughout the forests of the Pacific NorthWest—are relics from the ancient forests cleared by the timber industry 150–200 years ago. Many of the stumps from these forests are still present in various states of decomposition, and I began to view them as altars—abandoned and forgotten in the forest.

The seed for the stump series was planted many years prior, though, in 2012. I’d begun photographing these cedar stumps on trips back to the West Coast from New York to visit family. It wasn’t until 2020, though—when I returned to the West Coast to escape COVID—that I began to paint them.

The stump paintings were a natural progression from the Blanket Series. The stumps themselves resembled my cloaked figures, and they interacted with the landscapes much the same way: they were present, dominant, and engaged with their surroundings, but also possessed a certain sense of detachment and displacement from it. Evolving out of the stump series eventually came the trees I’m painting now.

I’d started photographing and painting these trees—in my mother’s garden in kwekwenis (Lang Bay), British Columbia—during the pandemic, and there was something iconic about each one that deeply captivated me. I was also interested in the art historical notion of gardens as spaces of healing and care and a place where the magical and divine dwell.

Peter Gynd, Statements used to emphasize and organize certain Features in this World, 2023, oil on board, 10 x 8 inches

Your brushwork is gestural, and your color is lush. The text calls your work “ optimistic.” What is your take on that, and what is your approach to beauty?

Beauty is something that I think has become a bit of a bad word in the art world over the last few decades or so. People have been shy to claim it in their work. I have definitely seen attitudes towards this change in recent years, but an aversion to beauty still seems to exist. As a creator, though, I see beauty as one of the gifts I have to offer through my work.

I see Art as a reflection, representation, and celebration of culture, and culture evolves in tandem with the environment around us. If nature is the direct representation of divine balance—and we are all connected to all things in this world—then the beauty in nature exists in ourselves, and divine beauty exists in each of us. People often glaze over when I start talking about ‘the divine’ and our ‘connection to all things in the universe,’ but I view it as one of the central purposes of art. Human beings are spiritual beings.

Regardless of religion—which I view as more a way to administrate spirituality rather than a way to foster a direct personal connection to a higher existence—human beings have always sought an understanding of our relationship to this world. One could call it a quest for universal truth. Science seeks this, religion seeks this, medicine seeks, and art seeks this. At one point, this was all wrapped up under the same banner of religion, but now they are independent quests, and people seem to forget that they are all parallel paths towards the same place: balance and sustainability.

Balance and sustainability are very important to my studio practice. Artists’ creative practices are complex ecosystems—the same way the environment and our economies are complex ecosystems—and when things are in balance, our lives and societies are filled with beauty. Beauty could be defined as a representation of balance.

Peter Gynd, In the process of turning Passion into Principle, 2023, oil on linen, 36 x 30 inches

You say in the interview, “I used the photographic images along with my memories and emotions of Lang Bay to place myself in the mindset to paint the work—much the way an actor would draw on past personal experiences to induce emotion into their scenes. I made a series of 30 abstracted and playful paintings in Houston based on the garden images, and what quickly emerged was a focus on the view from the top of the driveway looking towards Dunlop Road.” Can you tell us more about that process and why do you think you were drawn to the view from the top of the driveway?

Many people find it funny that I’ve become so obsessed with my mother’s driveway. As with most things in our lives and artistic practices, things evolve in tandem. While in kwekwenis in 2020, I made a few small paintings of the trees in my mother’s garden and took many photographs. I always have my camera on me, and it’s become my sketchbook. I take thousands of photographs of scenes or subjects I’m painting. My image archive to date is about 180,000 images. Of the driveway scene, I’ve taken a few thousand.

When I found myself in Houston in early 2022, I began exploring several scenes from my image archive. One of these was a neighborhood I’d grown up in near Vancouver and had also been photographing over the years. What really struck me while back in the area periodically in 2020-22 was seeing the complex relationships between the manicured hedges, lawns, and shrubs with the indigenous cedar and fir trees scattered throughout the neighborhoods.

Concurrently, I’d also been reading about the history of urban planning in North America and the ties and effects national and municipal regulations and bylaws have on how our landscape is shaped, navigated, and defined. This North Vancouver neighborhood, for example, had been developed en-mass in the 1960s and 70s during the rush to suburbanization. A handful of builders and developers essentially defined the way this landscape took shape.

What’s been interesting to me in photographing the area recently is that the bulk of the original houses have been knocked down and replaced with larger, more ostentatious structures. What has remained in many instances as a constant, though, are the hedges, shrubs, and trees. In a time of drastic human change to a place, the ‘natural’ elements have defined continuity.

In painting these scenes from my photographs, I was also drawn to the roadways and found a playfulness in the patchwork of road repairs—due in part to the new construction—and viewed them as yet another set of imposed patterns on the environment. At the same time I was making these hedge and road paintings, I was also beginning the paintings of my mother’s garden. These concurrent works led to a natural progression in the garden paintings toward an interest in depicting my mother’s own patchworked rural asphalt driveway. In my early paintings of the garden series, it’s easy to see the focus on the driveway that evolved in tandem with an interest in the two trees flanking it.

Peter Gynd, The possibility that the line between fictionality and factuality is finer than ordinarily acknowledged, 2023, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 inches

Tell us about the serial aspect in your plein air paintings.

My process pulls from traditional studio practices. I’m a fifth-generation artist and was classically trained as a teenager. This has always influenced the way I approach art-making. Observational painting and plein air painting have always directly informed and influenced the studio work I’m doing. In this particular series, all the larger works were built directly from elements of the smaller plein-air paintings.

During the summer, while back on the property, I was making about five plein air paintings a week of the driveway scene, and back in the studio, I usually have 30-50 of them on view throughout the space. When it comes time to make the larger paintings, I select three of these plein air works that best represent the emotion, intent, composition, and color scheme of what I’m trying to depict that day. It’s from these three smaller works I’ll make the larger ones.

One thing that’s also been important to me is the realization that I’m a monolithic painter. I like to start and finish a painting in one single session. With the pein air works, this is easy; there is a very real and forced time limit on a work: the light outdoors changes at least every 30-40 minutes. That time pressure generally forces me to get outside myself and into some sort of meditation while painting. I’ve tried to translate this experience and meditation into the larger works. These larger works are all still single-session paintings—but now that session is 12–16 hours long.

What are your thoughts when you look at the series as a whole?

I think that artists need time, distance, and the benefit of hindsight from a body of work before we can say what it’s about. There’s always so much that goes into the production of a series that to be able to concisely and adequately describe all that’s captured in there would be near impossible. This is where I think curators, art critics, and the art-viewing public are invaluable, though. Everyone else but me has the benefit of distance and their own lived experience to draw connections and recognize elements that I may not have even realized were there at this point.

The Canadian painter Gordon Smith had a saying that I’m a hundred painters deep. I like to say that I am a million painters deep. So much history has come before to inform the language we use as artists, and the global history of art is more connected than many people seem to recognize. At this point the oldest rock paintings are believed to be close to a hundred thousand years old. I would argue that painting as a cultural practice is likely a couple hundred thousand years older than that.

The true depth and meaning of what we’re doing as artists then, I don’t think, is really for us to define or even attempt to dictate. I think that society, history, and our continued cultural evolution will come to build the true relationships of meaning that exist in any artist’s work. Our job as artists is to make the work and respond to our times. If it’s any good, it’ll be history’s job to define it.

Peter Gynd with his solo show 10989 Dunlop Road, on view at the qathet Art Centre in Canada until March 9.

“10989 Dunlop Road” is a solo exhibition of recent oil paintings by Peter Gynd. February 3 – March 9, 2024. qathet Art Centre’ Powell River, British Columbia, V8A 2B8 Tla’amin Nation territory