Canadian Rockies Paintings: Original Latex-Acrylic Mountain Landscapes
Painters have been coming to the Canadian Rockies for over a century, mostly to paint them the same way. I live here, and I paint them differently — high-contrast, vividly coloured, graphic — because that's how the mountains actually feel when you're under them. A photograph flattens the Rockies. Standing in the Bow Valley at seven in the morning does not.
I came to this the long way around: art school in Ontario, twenty years drawing buildings as an architectural illustrator, twenty more running an art school of my own. All of it taught me the same lesson — strong structure first, then let the colour do the feeling. The Rockies reward exactly that. Seen from the valley floor they're already graphic: stacked ridgelines, hard shadow, snow against stone. My job is to simplify what's there until only the true part is left, then push it.
Brushes, layers, and mountain light
Everything is latex-acrylic on canvas, worked with straight and angled brushes. I block the big landforms in first with wide flat strokes, then build the faces up in layers — the paint is heavy-bodied enough that each pass leaves a ridge you can see in raking light, which is fitting, because that's exactly what mountain light does to the peaks every morning. Larch yellow, glacier turquoise, that near-violet the rock turns at dusk: the colours are pushed, but never invented.
The places I keep coming back to
Banff and the Bow Valley, with its peaks and valley light. Lake Louise and Moraine Lake, with their unmistakable turquoise. The Three Sisters above Canmore, which I've painted so many times they have their own story here in the Journal. Some of those canvases are still in the studio: Rocky Mountain Summer — the painting at the top of this page — along with Inside the Rockies, Graphic Rocky Mountains and Hillside Pathway, all in the store. Others, like Johnston Canyon and Moraine Lake, have already found their collectors. An original only exists once; that's the point of it. Select works are also available as signed and numbered canvas giclées, in a limited edition of 95.
Your mountains
Nearly every collector who writes to me has a specific mountain in mind — the view from a favourite hike, the peak outside a family cabin window. If yours isn't on a canvas yet, that's a commission: your place, your size, painted the way I paint everything else. Reach out through the contact page and tell me which mountain it is. There's usually a story attached, and the story is where the painting starts.
The full collection — Rockies, West Coast, florals and abstracts — lives in the store, and new paintings appear on Instagram first, with time-lapse videos on YouTube showing how they're made. — Martin