Horizons | Tanya Kirouac, Peter Rotter, Dan Ryan & Boyd Waites
Feb 10 - 24

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 10 @ 3 - 5 pm
RSVP your attendance to responses@wallspacegallery.ca

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Wall Space Gallery invites you to join us for the presentation of new paintings by four renowned landscape artists; Tanya Kirouac, Peter Rotter, Dan Ryan and Boyd Waites. Through their unique approaches, each of these artists explore the use of the horizon line, whether through its stark presence or its abstract denial, to tether us to reality or allow us to drift into psychological spaces of reverie. 

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A horizon line in painting is often considered the most basic descriptor of space, grounding abstract environment into 'land' and 'sky' - "up" and "down". For Dan Ryan and Tanya Kirouac it is
a marker of space and the distance from a destination - at times expanding endlessly or encroaching on enclosure.

“Close observation and engagement with the subject matter is just the beginning. The process and challenge of creating is to see beyond the obvious. What you see in front of you, is my own personal version of the Landscape”

– Dan Ryan

Striking a balance between these extremes is Ryan’s Quiet Chill whose implied horizon becomes obscured in what might be snowy billows. Unable to see where the tree line ends, the horizon could expand forever, while the encircling trees interweave into a veil of expressionistic gesture and colour across our path.

Similarly, Kirouac accumulates impasto streaks of colour to break her landscapes into vibrant patchworks. She leans into deep space or denies it in favour of playful relationships between texture and colour, often in thick cold wax that she then carves back into.

In his realism, Peter Rotter is bound by the horizon, using it as a means to fragment the canvas into varying portions drawing us to open sky or pulling us earthwards as in Sunset Island. Rotter likewise withholds deep space from us through barricades of winter trees and snowy vistas. In The Stand, he focuses instead on rough textures of bark that push towards us, obscuring the horizon but leading us through multiple shallow drifts of snow.

Rather than create a barrier or shift point of view, Boyd Waites almost completely obliterates the horizon in mists of layered colour, leaving only hints to help us find our bearings. His ethereal landscapes become memories of the essence of places visited.

"The painting process involves building up layers, then removing it again, over and over, finally scraping or carving areas of color to reveal the underlying story. The moody, simple landscapes or
serene abstracts that  emerge expose my connection to my environment and history and invite viewers to reflect on their own experiences."

- Tanya Kirouac

Kirouac, Rotter, Ryan, and Waites loosen or amplify the grip of gravity and space to allow painting to connect with the sensorial experience of place. The power in these artists’ approaches to
disorientation or grounding through the horizon lies in their ability to shake us loose from our everyday experience of the world.

Tiffany April
Curator

Horizons Catalogue

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Tanya Kirouac was born and raised in Montreal, Canada and spent the early part of her career in Art Direction and Graphic Design in Toronto. In 2002, she shifted to the full-time production of fine art. Her focus is abstract landscapes that emerge from lingering memories, and impressions of places experienced or imagined.

Kirouac’s work can be found in collections throughout the world and in the U.S. and Canada.

Peter Rotter is a Canadian painter focusing on capturing the landscapes that have surrounded him his entire life. Feeling is the essential motif behind his work; the initial inspiration holding the key to the process that evolves afterwards.

Rotter studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, and has recently transitioned to a home studio in the Kawarthas to be closer to his inspiration.

Dan Ryan is a contemporary artist steeped in a rich tradition of landscape paintin. His dynamic and energetic abstracts are where mood, colour, light and texture collide. Ryan makes use of impasto applications of paint, allowing drips and undulations to reveal the hand of the artist. His gestural and free style of painting breathes life and motion into the subject matter whether abstract or landscape.

Ryan trained in Cape Dorset while working with the Inuit and their Artist Co-op. He also received a solid foundation in Illustration and Design from Sheridan College. Ryan worked as an Art Director and Illustrator with several of Canada’s top advertising agencies. Ryan now resides in Sarnia, Ontario and paints full time.

Boyd Waites has been drawing, painting, and creating since an early age. He attended Chester School of Art foundation course and then a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) degree at Central St Martins in the UK. Always most interested in our natural surroundings and people and their inner emotions and feelings. He is not interested in faithfully depicting a particular place and his work could be categorized broadly as Abstract Expressive Landscape.

Recently he has returned to painting in earnest and full time, operating between Studios at Lake of Bays and Oakville in Ontario, Canada
initially until moving in April 2023 to a farm in the Kingston area where he now has a large studio in a converted barn.

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