Thank you to everyone who attended the opening of The Bliss of Rain on Wednesday evening at the gallery in Berlin. I was joined by many friends from Canada and Germany, and it was a pleasure to spend the evening with such an engaged and welcoming group of collectors, curators and artists. My sincere thanks to Kristin Hjellegjerde, and to Eva Maria Ostendorf, director and partner of the Berlin gallery, for this opportunity for a solo exhibition in Germany.
I spent the day before the opening working directly on the gallery walls while the team from the gallery were busy completing the rest of the installation. This mural-like painting is in my drawing style and was made with brush over a deep blue ground. It wraps around two walls, running behind the paintings, so the canvases sit inside a larger landscape rather than simply hanging on a wall. I made it the same way I make the paintings, quickly and from memory. It exists only for the run of the show and will be painted over when the exhibition closes.
The show brings together fourteen new paintings completed in my Victoria, BC studio over this past summer. It runs until December 19th, 2026.
‘THE BLISS OF RAIN’
Living on the west coast, where the weather is so often grey and wet, I have always felt a kind of calm with rainfall. What has changed is how present rain now is in our minds, whether through its absence or its arrival. In some parts of the world it has become a gift where it was once an inconvenience. These paintings are less about the rain itself than about how it is experienced, in the landscape and in the body.
Nearly all the compositions are built around a waterline, with the forest above and its reflection below, so the solid and the dissolved share the same picture. The colour moves from cool blues and greys to the rust, orange and ochre of summer heat, and in a few paintings that heat is just beginning to break. My emotions are sitting close to the surface of the work. It is hard for them not to be at the moment. By giving them honest titles I hope to reach people through how they are feeling too.
THE BLISS OF RAIN | 2026 | oil on linen | 39.25" x 35.5" (100cm x 90cm)
FEELING EXUBERANT | 2026 | oil on canvas | 54" x 63.75" (137cm x 162cm)
OUTWARDLY FLOW | 2026 | oil on canvas | 54" x 64.25" (137cm x 163cm)
TASTING OF WET FOREST | 2026 | oil on linen | 54" x 54" (137cm x 137cm)
THE FOREST HAS DEVOURED MY SOUL | 2026 | oil on linen | 54" x 64.25" (137cm x 163cm)