In removing the individual mountain from the surrounding range, I decontextualize the subject, making it symbolic rather than representational. I treat the mountains like celebrities, fashioning larger than life, unattainable, beautiful, and mysterious portrayals. My interest in mountains dates back to my childhood, when my brother and I would scramble around our backyard of British Columbia’s coastal range on Vancouver’s North Shore. My reverence for these snow-capped peaks extends itself into a devotional pursuit whereby I not only paint these mountains but climb most of them as well. Recent ski mountaineering expeditions into the Grand Tetons for example give an intimate sense for the mountain range and its characteristics, forging a relationship between the images I create and my experience. My most recent body of work is mainly about the Rockies. I have spent many a climbing and ski touring/mountaineering trip to this vast area and have always come away with a special understanding of geological time. The stratification in evidence, the layering of hundreds of millions of years of sediment cannot go unnoticed, and I developed a special relationship with its complexities. I was also reminded of the importance of Canadian landscape imaging with the recent major show of Tom Thomson’s work at the LA Hammer. Featuring his iconic paintings of mountains mainly from his sojourns to the Rockies, it was curated by Steve Martin and brought fresh light to an important intersection of Canadian landscape painting. Three lines of investigation form the basis of my newer work. Exploded contour maps of the Ice fields I would use to navigate the complex mountain environment, portraits of mountains I have skied or climbed with longitude and latitude grid overlays extending the concept of relief and travel, and dot overlays on mountains as a form of plotting. Still perhaps in an experimental stage, the Map paintings take on an almost abstract quality, while retaining my rigorousness for details. In removing the individual mountain from the surrounding range, I decontextualize the subject, making it symbolic rather than representational. I treat the mountains like celebrities, fashioning larger than life, unattainable, beautiful, and mysterious portrayals. I also record their rugged features in detail, as they individually assume their own unique personalities. My use of bright monochromatic colors and dot overlay draws aesthetic and conceptual comparisons to Pop Art, implicating these colossal stone figures in the pop culture lexicon. In this light the work becomes an exercise in re-framing how we perceive the mountains; examining the function of representation and how preserving something in imagery can make it iconic. My studying and mapping of these various mountains is also a form of personal inquiry. The dots and grids may represent coordinate plotting, metaphorically pointing to the impermanence of their man-made structures that attempt to prescribe location at the intersection of human and geological time. I also paint evidence of erosion, hoping to remind us of the temporal nature of the mountains which, seemingly anchored in time, force us to acknowledge our transient existence on this earth.