Amber Pass by Ivan Kenneth Eyre

Provenance:
Collection of the artist
Wallace Galleries, Calgary (1995)
Private Collection, Calgary

Literature:
Pavillion Gallery, Ivan Eyre: The Paintings, Assiniboine Park, 2004, pages 18-19 and 254
Denis Cooley, Amy Karlinsky and Mary Reid, Figure Ground: The Paintings and Drawings of Ivan Eyre, Winnipeg, 2005, page 19

Born in Tullymet, Saskatchewan in 1935, and completing his university studies at the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Manitoba, the artist was heavily influenced by the Canadian prairie landscape. In 1969, Eyre began renting a large room in the old warehouse district of Winnipeg. The view of the western city sky through the large windows of his studio became a vital component in many of his compositions. The practice of landscape painting has continued throughout the artist’s career with the Saskatchewan and Manitoba setting figuring prominently as works of imagination, an ode to the artist’s personal history. Eyre comments on the landscape genre of painting: “The subject is inexhaustible. Infinite possibilities exist. It’s still possible to make of a landscape a very personal statement, even a radical one, different from anything previous.”

“Amber Pass” is a prime example of one of Eyre’s later large-scale landscapes. It displays a vast view of a mountainous trail, while maintaining a strong attention to fine details. Each branch of the shrubbery is painstakingly depicted throughout the canvas. Art historian Pat Bovey comments on this quality of Eyre’s landscapes, stating: “Eyre’s keen sense of composition has enabled him to treat in the same work both the macro space of the prairie and the micro-detail of the grasses, leaves, trees and individuals in that expanse. Some details are magnified, others reduced in size.” Interestingly, Eyre notes that these landscapes are never done on location and does not proclaim the scenes or even perspectives to be realistic. “Amber Pass” and his other lush landscapes of riverbanks, fields and mountains are instead generated to induce associations of home and familiarity.

In this masterwork, Eyre draws us into the composition, along the winding path up into the snow-covered mountains in the distance. The painting has an engrossing effect on the viewer; Eyre achieves this by including multiple perspectives, guiding the eye to various points in the upper portion of the landscape. Author Nancy Hermann speaks to this strategy of Eyre’s, and describes the viewer’s immersive experience with large landscapes such as “Amber Pass”: “The artist offers no single ledge on which the observer may stand and fully take in all aspects of a work. The viewer must enter into a painting’s theatre by travelling across it and into it, and thus interact with the work, rather than studying it from a fixed distance.”