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Gareth Bate reinvigorates Canadian landscape painting in the face of 21st century climate change

Canadian landscape painting meets 21st Century climate change in exhibition by award winning OCAD graduate.
Gareth Bate is the winner of the 401 Richmond Career-Launcher Prize as 500 sft studio given to one Ontario College of Art & Design graduate for one year.
The painting series "Lament" is a song of sorrow and loss, an existential contemplation on our place within nature and our effect on the world. It is a reinvigoration of Canadian landscape painting in the face of 21st century climate change and environmental destruction.
The places in "Lament" are special to Gareth, like Grenadier Pond in Toronto's High Park and Kings County in Prince Edward Island. These paintings evolved intuitively out of a desire to paint the beauty he sees in nature. However, they become something quite different. The result was often dark, haunted and lonely. A strange melancholy permeates each painting, of human presence felt but never seen.
Landscape painting is fundamental to Canadian identity. Culture is nature as opposed to being some how separate. If we value our environment so intensely, are we willing to make the sacrifices necessary to preserve the biosphere? Will we make difficult choices of self-control, such as not flying and embracing a carbon rationing system? Or will we instead cut the tops off mountains while "waiting for the miracle"?
Sometimes the saddest songs are the most inspiring. Gareth's hope is not to sink into guilt and despair at the state of the world, but rather to find beauty in the tragic. As an artist he chooses to believe that making art will somehow have an impact. That painting is doing. It will make people feel, think and consider. It will motivate and affirm a sense of hope.

Getting there: Richmond Street, east of Spadina Avenue

For more information contact: Gareth Bate
Phone: 416-530-0057
Email: garethbate@rogers.com

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