“Driscoll deserves credit for pushing hard against the standard viewing experience. For his show at Angell Gallery last year, he built a reflecting pool in the gallery to double down on his paintings’ visual assault. His whole practice is devoted to taking a creaky old convention in landscape painting and giving it a Red Bull jolt of invigorating energy…”

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It’s not unusual to spot the Northern Lights in Edmonton, but this is the only way to experience them indoors — and you don’t even have to wait till sundown.

Over the next few weeks, a visit to the city’s Peter Robertson Gallery should feel like a visit to the nearest National Park. Look up, and you’ll see the Aurora Borealis in peacock greens and blues. Look down, and you’ll see them, too. That’s because the entire gallery has been turned into a man-made lake — flooded with more than 11,000 litres of water.

If you want a closer peek at the celestial landscape paintings hung around the space, you’ll have to hop along a path of stepping stones. (Some 3,000 pounds of rock were brought in for the experience.) Or try the floating boardwalk. With every step, you’ll make the sparkling reflections fracture and ripple.

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Imagine. You are outside, on a still, dark night. It’s late September and the ice has yet to settle on the lake. But the northern lights are anxious to get started for the season, and have streaked the blackness with shimmers of blue and green. The night is full, expectant.

That’s one person’s impression of the scene that greets from the entrance of the Peter Robertson Gallery, where Toronto artist Steve Driscoll has arrived with a remarkable installation called And a Dark Wind Blows.

The show features six, large contemporary landscapes, which are undeniably stunning. But the backdrop demands equal attention. The dramatic representations are placed alongside a man-made lake and a winding boardwalk, furiously constructed by the artist and gallery staff over the last several days. A dock is anchored at the far end of the gallery, close to an expansive vision of northern lights titled These Are Truly the Last Days.

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A dark lake has replaced the floor at Peter Robertson Gallery. Abstract celestial clouds, golden milky ways and the luminous glow of the aurora borealis dance in the reflective water.

Steve Driscoll has always painted nature – forests, landscapes and gardens – but this time he bids us to gaze upwards. And he’s gone to great lengths to complete the picture with his latest exhibit, “And a Dark Wind Blows.”

The Peter Robertson Gallery in Edmonton is pleased to present Steve Driscoll: And a Dark Wind Blows, a suite of new contemporary landscape paintings by the highly regarded Toronto artist. Presented as an immersive installation featuring an artificial lake and boardwalk, the show opens Friday, October 14 (reception 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.) and runs through Saturday, November 5, 2016.

The centrepiece of the show, the monumental These Are Truly the Last Days (title borrowed from a song by Montreal post-rock orchestra, Godspeed You! Black Emperor) presents an ecstatic vision of the northern lights. Created using Driscoll’s favoured medium of pigmented urethane, the three-panel painting contains passages of unsurpassed beauty, as swirling eddies of green, blue, purple and yellow-gold suggest nebulas, galaxies and rivulets of shimmering stardust, below a star-filled sky. Positioned at the long end of the gallery, it may be viewed from a wooden boardwalk over the flooded gallery floor, or seen more intimately from a small floating raft accessed by stepping stones.

In his latest body of work, artist Steve Driscoll tips us off to what’s going on by borrowing the show’s title from a lyric by American songwriter John Prine. “Actually everything is just about the same” reflects a serial approach, in which the artist presents variations of four images of the Canadian wilderness, each painted in his signature medium of pigmented urethane.

The sets represent moments from a canoe trip in Ontario’s Algonquin Park, a setting that looms large within Canadian art history as Group of Seven territory. Rocks along a shoreline and a waterfall are seen from the vantage point of the artist/voyageur as he paddles down a river. A canoe moored by the shore and a view of water glimpsed through a clearing in the trees represent the “land” portion of the journey.

Just a Sliver of the Room marks a new phase for Steve Driscoll, the esteemed Toronto-based painter whose landscape paintings inject fresh energy into this traditional Canadian genre. For this exhibition Driscoll has created Recovered Shore, an eight-panel shoreline scene, ablaze with the colours of late summer. At forty feet in length, it is comparable in scale to Monets Water Lilies, and is Driscolls largest work to date.

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When the Peter Robertson Gallery described Canadian artist Steve Driscoll’s show, And a Dark Wind Blows, to me as “a water installation that would reflect his paintings”, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Maybe a few oversized tubs of water placed under the works?

What I didn’t expect was what I saw when I went to the preview a few nights ago — the entire gallery had been turned into a lake.

Specifically, the floor of the gallery, and a few inches up the wall, had been lined with a heavy plastic that was then filled with water and dyed black. On top of this water, a wooden walkway, a dock, and huge rocks were placed to give viewers a way to enter, and walk through, the space. The walkway and dock were built so that they move slightly as you walk over them, causing ripples. The art, reflecting in the ripples, seems to move along the surface of the water.

The works are all inspired by the night sky, and the show cumulates in a stunning three panelled painting of the aurora borealis, or northern lights. Though the paintings are hung on the wall like they would be in any show, the viewer can not actually get close to the pieces in the same way that you could in a more typical space. Instead, you must stay on the walkway that guides you from work to work at a distance.

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The Smoke Show series captures the smoke of a campfire, something unusual as the theme for paintings. Driscoll says that he is most interested in the process within his work. Every new show starts with experimentation in his studio and when he comes across a new way to manipulate a material or set of colours, he will look to nature to see where it can be applied. He uses the industrial material urethane that permits a watercolor-like translucency.

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In an effort to discover more about your unique perspectives created in paint what do you like to develop, before paint even hits a surface, to generate a concept or project?

There are two main ways I work on development. The first would be studio experimentation, and the other would be getting myself out to nature. When I’m in the city there isn’t much time where paint isn’t hitting the surface. I like to work in a number of directions while I am coming up with ideas and compare my own reactions to those studies and experiments. The direction I usually chose is the one that most directly puts me into a felt experience. There is a certain sense of awe and wonder that I am always looking for in life, and the places I find it are in nature and the paint itself. I love being small in a huge theatre of a slow moving world. Watching paint move and settle compares to the experience of watching light reflect off of the waters surface. So I guess the time I spend watching and recording is where I do my development.

You are currently showing at Angell in Canada, what does this body of work show and how has it differed from work previously completed?

…a wall to wall pond which has a wooden boardwalk meandering over it’s surface…

Yes, I suppose the main difference with this exhibition is that I focused on creating a more immersive experience. Not just in the individual paintings but also the gallery space as a whole. The installation includes a wall to wall pond which has a wooden boardwalk meandering over it’s surface. So the viewer has a distinctly different relationship with the paintings and a typical gallery experience.  After completing the first couple tests with a mini pond in my studio I realized that there would be no point bringing nature inside unless I was willing to paint on the scale of nature. The main piece in the installation is 9 feet tall and 40 feet wide, turning a corner in the gallery midway. The result compares more with a walk around an actual woodland lake than a stroll through an art gallery.

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