The Landscape Within: Greg Angus and the Duality of Place

The Landscape Within: Greg Angus and the Duality of Place
Opening reception July 12 @ 1:00 p.m. 
Guest curated by Dimitri Papatheodorou

Canadian landscape painting continues to evolve beyond the familiar vistas of pine forests and misty lakes. Today’s artists engage with environment not only as a subject but as a living system, one shaped by Indigenous meaning, urban expansion and climate change. All valid approaches, however Greg Angus depicts the relationship between Canadian culture and landscape differently.

In Canada, ‘interior’ speaks as much to the soul of the country as it does to the boundless forests, lakes, and skies. Greg Angus paints a double interior. His time in Japan taught that invisibility can sharpen one’s vision. As a Canadian artist living and working in Japan, he was invisible to that culture, hidden within the hierarchy of Aikido practice, a refined modern-era martial-art practice. As a large man, Angus was not exactly physically invisible, but rather unrecognizable, his inner life hidden within a socially strict culture. in Japan, Angus became a ‘rare’ artist, culminating in exhibitions and sales, including two exhibitions at the Canadian Embassy. Back in Canada, that vision found room to breathe and expand. More than depicting landscape, each painting becomes a landscape; the disciplined rhythms of (his) Aikido practice meeting the raw, open spaces of Canada’s wilderness. Through layered textures and shifting colour, Angus explores how the environment outside mirrors the landscape within.

Re-settling back home in Canada, Angus allowed encaustic’s physicality to expand. He embraced the medium’s capacity for bold gesture: scoured surfaces, molten rivulets, and impasto ridges that speak to the rugged contours of the Canadian landscape. He has harnessed encaustic’s textural depth to evoke ice-cracked lakes and wind-scarred rock faces, while still preserving the nuanced interplay of light and dark cultivated in Japan.
Dimitri Papatheodorou, Guest Curator