Canadian artist Steve Driscoll's breathtaking large-scale paintings capture the ever changing nature of the outdoors. His confidence with his chosen materials results in intricately layered, yet energetic and loose paintings that are highly steeped in landscape traditions.
Driscoll's show, Just a sliver of the room, took place at Angell Gallery in 2016. The exhibition transformed the room by filling the gallery floor with water and confining viewers to a wooden boardwalk that wound through the space. This created an immersive environment for the viewer, yet controlled their experience within it. The water maximized the visual impact of Driscoll's paintings through the reflection which doubled the surfaces of the panels. The reflection is a trope of landscape painting, however in this work it is effectively subverted by being is taken out of the landscape and recreated in the gallery. This installation embodied a pristine, idealized natural world. Driscoll hand picked memorable and quintessential elements of his experiences in the Canadian outdoors and allowed them to create a compelling collision between a controlled environment and our man-made enjoyment of nature.
Driscoll's continued use of urethane showcases his ability to control a unusual and demanding material. The choice of material is not only aesthetically thrilling but also conceptually sound, as it successfully enhances the artificiality of his fabricated natural world, as created in the show Just a sliver of the room.
