Acquired directly from the artist
Private Collection, Toronto
Exhibited
You are Here: Kim Dorland and the Return to Painting, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, October 26, 2013 - January 5, 2014
Literature
Katerina Atanassova “You are Here: Kim Dorland and the Return to Painting” in Katerina Atanassova, Robert Enright and Jeffrey Spalding, Kim Dorland, Vancouver/Berkeley and Kleinburg, Ontario, 2014, pages 43-56, reproduced page 49 as “Green Tree, Blue Tree #2”
Alberta-born painter Kim Dorland studied at Vancouver’s Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, going on to earn his MFA at York University in Toronto. Influenced early on by the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, Dorland’s work has involved an exploratory engagement with Canada’s long-established tradition of landscape painting. His nature-inspired paintings often begin with field trips where source material is gathered with Polaroid photographs and sketches. “Green Tree Blue Tree” directly references Tom Thomson’s tightly composed oil sketches of dense foliage. Dorland’s trees are built up with aggressive, linear swathes of paint, the brazen use of impasto so sculptural that in areas it physically extends from the picture’s edges. Birch trees, incongruously depicted in silver and gold metallic spray paints, curtain the composition. The scene is permeated with the red glow of a menacing sunset. Dorland has shattered the conventional notion of the romantic Canadian landscape.
The painting imparts psychological weight through the sheer physicality and density of the woods depicted. Curator Katerina Atanassova notes that “nature is imbued with a psychological dialogue between artists and viewers. In Dorland’s work, the forest often
seems to be closing in on the artist, neither inviting nor foreboding, but pervaded by a feeling of intensity and danger”. Kim Dorland has consistently maintained a sincere, non-ironic belief in the lasting artistic viability of painting in contemporary times. The artist has asserted “My work is very much about paint. It’s about other things too: landscape, portraiture, identity, psychology...but for me, it always comes back to the medium.”
