Canadian landscape painter John Stevenson finds inexhaustible inspiration in nature’s ever-shifting colors and proportions. Born and raised in Ontario, and now based in Quebec, his light-dappled compositions evoke Impressionists and several of Canada’s famous Group of Seven, while creating his own unique style. Working both in his studio and at outdoor locations throughout Canada’s wilderness, Stevenson applies pure oil paints directly to the canvas before mixing and distributing colors with a palette knife. As a result his compositions are complex fields of smooth and thick layers, sculptural images that respond differently to varying lighting and points of view.
Firmly rooted in figuration, his canvases evade strict realism in favor of textural beauty and a more evocative, intuitive image that transmits a multi-sensory — rather than strictly visual — sense of a specific place and time. Stevenson combines his powerful choices of palettes and styles of application with a dramatic flair for composition, capturing landscapes in all their fleeting yet vast splendor.