What is Canada?
Painting Canada Asks Me to Question, What is Canada?
When I began down a path fueled by an Olympic Games to answer the question, What is Canada to me? I never thought I would find myself nearly two decades later still working to express my thoughts of this country on canvas.
The 2010 Olympics in Vancouver were loud and rife with stereotype: giant igloos and Inukshuk, beer and moose. I became curious about what the West Coast was trying to say about itself and how it was representing all of us on the world stage. Canadians are known for our quirky, self-deprecating sense of humour, and for gleefully making fun of ourselves at our own expense. When I began thinking about my impressions of Canada, I too began with stereotype and popular culture. It felt like the most natural place to start.
I began painting hockey masks floating above the landscape, stories of hockey on canvas, and cultural icons reimagined through paint. I placed the Stanley Cup in the serene lounge of Château Lake Louise and set a giant cup of Tim Hortons coffee and donut holes on a frozen rink surrounded by skaters. I painted a Mountie with a thumbs up like The Fonz, riding a horse with a maple leaf tattoo on its flank that read “Eh.” I painted Pamela Anderson, clad in a bikini, reclining on top of a Macintosh’s Toffee Bar at Peggy’s Cove, and a portrait of everyday Canadians posed in front of the original Forum building, hockey stick in hand, wearing the same stoic expressions as American Gothic.
In 2016 I set out on a series of journeys that would take me across Canada and into the Northern Territories. Through residencies, exhibitions, and planned excursions, I began to ask a deeper question: Who are Canadians? What began as a playful exploration of symbols and stereotypes evolved into a profound investigation of identity, geography, and collective consciousness.
The question “What is Canada?” became not a single answer but a lifelong dialogue.
It became about experience and connection, about gathering impressions and stories, then filtering them through paint, memory, and emotion.
Nearly twenty years later, my visual stories of Canada now encompass people, landscapes, myth, and Mother Nature herself. My work has become a conversation between the land and the people, between history and the present moment. From coast to coast to coast, each painting tells part of the story of how this vast and complex country shapes those who live within it.
Writers such as Margaret Atwood, Louise Penny, Mike Myers, and Will Ferguson have wrestled with similar questions in their work. In Ferguson’s Why I Hate Canadians, he writes with both affection and frustration about our national character – our politeness, our contradictions, and our quiet pride. Like these authors, I too am searching for Canada, not as a fixed image, but as an evolving reflection of its people and places.
Through painting, I have learned that Canada is not one story but many. It is the laughter echoing from a rink in small-town Saskatchewan, the vast silence of the Arctic, the salt air of the Atlantic, and the rain-soaked forests of the Pacific. It is our symbols, our humour, and our shared moments of awe in nature’s company.
To paint Canada is to keep asking the question. And in doing so, I continue to discover a country that reveals itself one brushstroke at a time. For collectors, each painting in this ongoing series offers a piece of that discovery – a visual story of Canada seen through the eyes of an artist who has spent decades exploring its symbols, spirit, and soul.
