I'm excited to share with you the latest news from gallery row in Yorkville. My debut solo, STRATA OF MEMORY, opens at Ingram Gallery on May 3rd. Check back in later April for a preview of the show paintings.

When I began working toward this exhibition, I found myself drawn to the smaller moments in a landscape—the kind you might pass by without noticing: the shimmer of sunlight on a lake's surface, the texture of weathered stones underwater, the quiet dance of grasses in the wind. These fragments of the natural world felt as alive and significant as any sweeping vista. By narrowing the view, I hope to expand the experience.

This shift from distance to proximity mirrors the way we remember. An abstract recollection suddenly gives way to detail—scent, texture, sound—that brings the past into focus. As I painted, I thought about how memories accumulate, building strata over time, just as sediment layers create the rock formations I've captured in many of my paintings. Layers shape both landscapes and lives, and memory gives landscapes meaning.

On my daily walks along the Humber River, I'm privy to even the slightest seasonal changes, which show themselves in an endlessly evolving pageantry. Vibrant but momentary autumn foliage, snow-covered branches, sunlight shimmering on the lively river—all of these subjects have made their way into my work. I have always had an appreciation for fragility and transience. The painting process gives me space to meditate on the delicate rhythms of nature. Painting grasses and wildflowers, among other such fleeting subjects, is an act of resistance against a culture of distraction and disconnection from nature. What do we lose when we stop noticing the small wonders around us?

I’m more interested in representing the landscape as close-up fragments than sweeping vistas. Fragments challenge traditional notions of perspective and scale and create immediacy and intimacy of experience. The focus is on small, specific portions of the natural world - be it the patterns of stones, the chaotic eruptions of grasses in fields, or the play of light on dandelions. By narrowing the view, I hope to expand the experience. 

Each painting in the series affirms the unique beauty of these natural convergences of water, earth, and sky, showcasing the fluidity, tension, and balance in our environment. Through its reflective nature, water mirrors the expanse of the sky, blurring the line between the two elements. The horizon is a powerful visual symbol in my work. This elemental junction is a point of infinite potential. The point where the earth meets water - a shoreline or a riverbank - is a constant change and interaction zone. These intricate paintings highlight textures, reflections, and how water flows over and around rocks. This micro-level convergence is a rich visual and thematic exploration of the interface between stability and fluidity, where landscapes are continuously (re)shaped.

My visual language has evolved with recent explorations of water-based media like sumi ink and acrylic underpainting. I am now looking into the rearview mirror and returning to my first love - drawing in soft pastels but with gouache underpainting infiltrating my mark-making. First, I lay compositional elements in gouache washes on sanded pastel paper. Then, I build up layers of pastel pigments on top of the gouache to achieve depth, texture, and vibrancy. Sometimes, the gouache underpainting is left alone to shine through. The cumulative layers are dynamic and expressive in effect. In these works on paper, the word “strata” also applies to the compositional layers within the landscapes - reflections of trees on water, the different textures of vegetation and foliage along the riverbank, and the atmospheric layers of sky reflected in the river.

The Humber River is my local riparian zone. Each day brings new visual excitement, for nature conceals as much as it reveals. While looking at the summer's low water, I would see water striders on its surface and watch little fish catching the measly current just below. My eyes negotiated the detritus of collected leaves and rocks covered in sediment on the murky bottom. I would also see reflections of the surrounding trees or often just their crowns on quiescent water. Sometimes, a water whorl created a pattern that radiated outward, stirring the surface and dizzying the eyes. In all this earthly reality, a cloud in the sky would suddenly materialize, its reflection floating on the water so that the river bottom and all life in the water disappeared under the cloud.

The idea of ‘as above, so below’ ties into the concept of correspondence - there is a relationship or reflection between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Laws and patterns in the higher realms are mirrored here on Earth. Painting the sky reflected on Earth is a way of looking for connection and meaning across different scales of existence. These paintings juxtapose heaven and Earth, connect the intangible with the material, and weave imagination into reality.

Surfacing is the act of becoming apparent, visible, or known. It is a transformative journey of emergence and revelation. As these recent paintings left the easel one by one, it became apparent that what was emerging was a new series inspired by our planet’s diverse and ever-changing surfaces. I focus on the intricacies of surfaces - textures, patterns, and geological formations. I convey a sense of reverence and awe for the complexity and beauty of nature. With gestural lines and looser application of paint executed with the help of unconventional tools, these new paintings inch closer to abstracted landscapes. I bring viewers closer to the sensory aspects of the natural world through this tactile experience.

This collection represents the interface between land and river, known as the riparian zone. The relevance of the word ‘transition’ is many-fold. First, there is the seasonal transition with the fallen autumn leaves. Then, there is the reference to the riparian zone as a significant biome, in which plants and animals help to filter the water as it passes, increasing its quality as it transitions downstream. Finally, from a painter’s viewpoint, there is the complexity of negotiating the various natural elements that transition from one to another. A tapestry of fallen leaves, wet-and-dry rocks, and dark reflections of denuded trees on moving water became integral elements in these dreamy riverine vistas.

This series of works is devoted to our Great Lakes watershed's diverse shorelines and forest surroundings. It has been an adventure to cover ground and celebrate, in paint, our precious freshwater lakes. The paintings from this collection tell stories of local geologies and vegetative communities—from the glacial-age erratic boulders of Awenda Provincial Park and the granite outcrops of Georgian Bay to the quiet lake vistas of the Algonquin and Muskoka regions.

Lake Superior shines like burnished silver in the brutal November sun. The day becomes nothing more but a shoreline freckled by rocks and a stretch of open water, depthless and pure. Every square foot of Superior’s rocky shoreline is a galaxy unto itself. The endlessly varied stones that collect along the water’s edge are objects of beauty, sentiment, and contemplation. Smooth or rough, monochrome or multihued, plain or patterned, each stone tells a different story of how it came to be. Its history is written in its shape, texture, and composition. The emerging designs are a language of sorts, hieroglyphs of pure form.

In winter 2021, an artist friend sent me a USB stick of photographs of his home region around Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia. The Maritime imagery triggered dormant emotions, smells, the familiarity of yesterday, and the loss of things never experienced. These Atlantic vistas helped me draw buried memories of my childhood on the Adriatic Sea coast of northern Croatia, where my parents and I spent an intense and beautiful two-year period between 1994 and 1996 - just after leaving the siege of Sarajevo and before immigrating to Toronto. That snippet of time on the Adriatic coast freed me from the chaos of war, far away from grenades and gnawing scarcity, and rooted me in coastal life. Water became my refuge and my soul’s language. Out of the intersection of memory and the familiar unknown, I developed this series of East Coast-inspired paintings.

The intertidal zone buzzes with a collective, living energy. It’s a space of beauty, adaptation, and resilience. Yet, it’s a fragile ecosystem. This narrow strip of coastal ground is alternately immersed in seawater and exposed to air. At low tide, the curtain is pulled back, and we become privy to life under the surface to which we are connected. A kaleidoscope of fantastical creatures is exposed for a moment. Everything is part of a single, living whole - a fabric of interdependence, movement, and renewal.

I forged a connection to the Canadian West Coast in 2016 with a kayaking trip to Haida Gwaii - a place where people, story, and land are inseparable. In seeking the counsel of nature and advice from the wise souls I got to know, my journey in Haida Gwaii (re)connected me with a deep place of origin. I discovered that the greatest hope lies in rethinking how we perceive our relationship with the natural world and the myriad creatures, including us humans, dependent on it for survival. Since then, I traveled repeatedly to the wild Pacific west coast of Vancouver Island. These Western-inspired paintings transpose the beauty of ecological diversity found in the old-growth forests and along the intertidal zone. They are landscapes of adaptation and resilience – geophysical spaces on the knife’s edge.

Beauty and proportion, a sense of stillness and lasting presence can be found in the most ordinary things. Whether painting vegetables, florals, or seashells, I look for the innate character of nature’s roots, structures, and relics. I breathe intimacy with the past without being overtly symbolic. My paintings are studies of balance, rhythm, and light. They are honest and quiet; a far cry from the passions and uncertainties of daily life. Still they are a part of life, or they point to how life could be: simple and undistracted.