In praise of wide open spaces
“I tend to get my best material completely by chance.”
That’s how Peter Fischer, a lifelong landscape painter, finds some of his subjects. The Dundas artist has tackled forest interiors and bodies of water. In Open Spaces, an exhibition of 15 oils at the Carnegie Gallery, he takes to the skies.
“I am always looking up at the ever-changing sky and delight in the spectacular variety it presents,” he tells me.
Fischer explores the sky’s many moods and its relationship to the land, taking inspiration from local landscapes and those on Canada’s East Coast.
He works in a soft-edged lifelike style, although he’s not one to pick out individual leaves and blades of grass.
Some of his landscapes boast dark and stormy skies, others are sunny and warm. In all of them, Fischer offers us a wide open space to enter.
“The best part about painting landscapes is the opportunity to give a viewer a sense or desire to enter into the painting as a place one would enjoy going to,” he says.
In “Imminent Changes,” Fischer treats the landscape simply as a series of irregular horizontals.
A bright yellow field lies in the foreground. A row of trees occupies the midground. A blue hill rises in the distance on the right.
Fischer paints the sky, which takes up almost half the pictorial space, as big, smooth streaks of blue, white and dark grey, with the dark grey clouds hanging heavily at the very top.
The clouds’ dark tones differ from the bright yellows, providing the painting with a dramatic contrast at top and bottom. Such a contrast helps to draw attention to the different characteristics of the two: the land, rooted and firm, and the ever-changing sky, the most transient part of a landscape painting.
“I don’t necessarily seek out dark clouds,” he says. “But they often just happen to be there, and I find a clear blue sky to be somewhat uninteresting, as is the light on a sunny day.”
But in “Betty’s Sunny Day,” Fischer does indeed create a sense of drama within the context of a sunny day.
A strikingly low horizon line supports a few trees that attempt to reach skyward. But they are dwarfed by the big sky painted in a serene shade of blue.
But this feeling of serenity seems at odds with the restless swirl of cloud taking up almost half of the sky.
There are no clouds in “Sunrise Along York Road.” Part of the land lies under a soft early morning mist. The darkness and the mist obscure details. A burst of exquisite pink in the distance on the right is the icing on the cake.
I ask him if he often gets up before dawn to find such moments.
“Would it be more heroic if I said yes?” he replies with a laugh. “But seriously, I do that occasionally because I’ve learned that trying to get a particular look to a scene would require many visits at exactly the same time at the same spot to get a desired image.”