Visit to Steve Driscoll’s Artist Studio – November 3

(Submitted by Brent Arlitt)

On Friday November 3, artist Steve Driscoll took DVAC club members on a private exclusive tour of his large artist studio in West Toronto, demonstrating some of the materials, processes and methods in creating very large format paintings. We saw dramatic visionary abstracted landscapes, created with intense colouration using pigmented urethane on white plastic panels, employing “wet-on-wet” technique. This is a method that Steve has uniquely developed over a number of years. Steve gave a talk on his educational background, materials, methods and the outdoor trips where he gets the inspiration for his beautiful painted scenes. He pointed out the features of many of the paintings on display, including a forest scene, that will soon be hanging in the atrium of the new Oakville Trafalgar Hospital. Steve had an exhibit at the McMichael Gallery this past Spring and Summer.

Steve Driscoll, an OCAD graduate, has emerged and is being recognized as one of Canada’s most exciting contemporary artists. Re-inventing landscape painting for the 21st century, Driscoll uses vibrant colour, monumental scale and industrial materials (pigmented urethane on plastic panels) to create ecstatic visions of wild places. Driscoll’s ground-breaking 2016 exhibition, Just a Sliver of the Room, captured national attention through an innovative gallery installation featuring a 40-foot long shoreline scene reflected in a 2,000-gallon artificial lake, complete with boardwalk.

To see more of his work, visit www.stevedriscoll.com