The Lost, 2008

Acquired directly from the Artist Private Collection, Portland, Oregon

Katerina Atanassova, Robert Enright and Jeffrey Spalding, "Kim Dorland", Vancouver/Kleinburg, 2014, page 120

Contemporary painter Kim Dorland’s work engages in a rich dialogue with the established traditions of Canadian landscape painting. Drawing from art history, personal experience, and his imagination, Dorland has developed an idiosyncratic art practice by pushing the materiality of oil painting to the extreme. Famously appearing in the work of Tom Thomson, one of Dorland’s favourite artists, the northern lights make for compelling subject matter. Dorland has also witnessed the natural phenomena in person: “We would spend a month or two every year in my wife’s family cabin in northern Saskatchewan. I don’t go deep into the landscape, or hunt, or anything like that. But every time I was there, I would take hundreds of photographs and bring back the experience with me. There’s a painting from 2007 of the northern lights that is a direct experience in nature.” Painted in 2008, "The Lost" continues his investigation of this motif. In "The Lost", the dark sky contrasts with the eerie glow of the lights, which flow in tendrils above the nocturnal scene. Aloof figures, themselves highlighted with neon orange and pink, stand gathered yet isolated. The painting's surface is brashly littered with sculptural mounds of oil paint, squeezed directly from the tube. Ominous, spiky trees line the horizon, placing the setting in or near a mysterious forest. The word “lost” has repeatedly appeared in Dorland’s titles, likely referring both to the physical and psychological sense of the word. The painting creates a formal and emotional tension between harmony and unease.