LANDSCAPE ART GOES BEYOND HORIZONS
Steve Driscoll doesn’t mind admitting it took a little convincing for his dealer, Jamie Angell, to agree to have his gallery flooded with three inches of inky black water. “That and a few beers,” Driscoll laughs. As he does, he’s pulling on boots to step into the same water in his studio, which he’s filled up as a not-so-dry run for his show there on April 29. You get the idea: as a landscape painter, Driscoll’s not so married to romantic notions of plein-air impressionism so much as he is tuned to his very contemporary times. The pond, complete with boardwalk, acts as a re- flecting pool for Driscoll’s day-glo compositions. Despite their scale, Driscoll paints them in a single day (mostly; Shore, a nine-by-40-foot behemoth, seen here, took two). That’s largely due to the fast-drying properties of his medium, a pigmented urethane that gives the work its artificial sheen. It helps place him in a genre of one: a landscape action painter. And working in the commercial advertising printing standard CMYK colour range, Driscoll brings landscape practice right up to the here and now. Just a Sliver of the Room, new paintings by Driscoll, opens at Angell Gallery, April 29, 1444 Dupont St., Unit 15 (angellgallery.com).