Dana Irving at the Ian Tan Gallery Sept. 6-30. For more info visit iantangallery.com.
It was a low-lying fog on the North Shore mountains that gave Dana Irving inspiration for her latest show, Atmosphere.
"I was doing the Grouse Grind last fall and just looking up at the fog and how it creates this kind of quiet," says Irving. "It seems to affect the way things sound."
Mist, rain and fog all inhabit the collection of paintings, on display at the Ian Tan Gallery in Vancouver, taking visitors through the ever-changing world of weather.
"Particularly stuff that we get a lot of here," says Irving.
Nature has been a continuing inspiration for Irving's paintings since her childhood days in Northern B.C. "I grew up around nature, I grew up like 30 miles from the nearest town and surrounded by forests and that was our playground when we were kids," she says. "I think it's just part of my psyche, you know, just being surrounded by trees."
Irving says when she moved to the West Coast, she could not believe the amount of space within the forests.
"These giant trees kind of limit the underbrush because they take up all the light," she says. "I was enamored with them. I just felt like this is where I belong."
The bold colours and whimsical scenes of Irving's work are reminiscent of the Group of Seven and Emily Carr. Irving says it was Group of Seven painter Lawren Harris that was her biggest influence over the years.
"I fell in love with his work when I was maybe 16 years old and just anything from that era of painting, the '30s and '40s, when they were really starting (to) streamline and stylize and simplify shapes, that's just always been appealing to me," she says.
But it was in the early 2000s that Irving says she started to find her "own language in that vein" when she was commissioned to paint a mural for the Whistler Northwind.
"I had a big commission to do a mural for a train that ran between Vancouver and Prince George," she says. "We decided: let's do it in that style of being a Canadian experience for tourists. So I really got to delve into it."
The more than 150 foot mural took about 10 months to complete.
"Before you ever paint, you have to draw all of that and know what it is you're going to paint, and then also there was lots of research involved because it depicted the journey from the West Coast. There's lots of different terrains between here and Prince George in BC, such a diverse province for landscape," says Irving. "Then there was a boardroom to impress and to get their approval and they had to agree that where it was going was what they wanted to see, so kind of a collaboration of sorts, really."
Irving has also painted murals for restaurants and private residences, but the train mural was her last big piece before she transitioned into gallery work.
"I have an old friend who has a gallery on Salt Spring Island and he just put the bug in my ear, he just said 'you know that mural you did for Whistler Northwind, if you did little paintings of pieces of that, I bet I could sell it.' I basically did that and I gave them six pieces and he sold them in a couple of months," she says.
The experience was an encouraging one for Irving.
"It's very validating for an artist to make a sale, it just means, aside from enjoying what you're doing, it's relevant to someone else," she says. "In the form of an income it seems miraculous, I still think whenever a painting sells it's a miracle because so many things have to come together for that to happen."
Irving's gallery shows take almost a year to put together, she says.
"That is how I make my living so the whole time I'm sort of setting aside work, I have to also keep new work in the gallery and make sales," she says. "So really you're doubling your outputs in order to have a show."
Irving says the last four months, in particular, have been spent getting ready for the show.
"The last four months has been very involved with the finishing process and all the little details that go into making the craftsmanship equal to the artwork," she says. "So there's lots of small things to do outside of some grand inspirational image."
Irving studied fine art at Victoria College of Art and did a year of postgrad at Emily Carr studying graphic design and photography. She also writes and plays music. One of her projects, a book composed of both her paintings and prose, has been in the works for two and a half years.
"It's kind of a love poem to nature, so it's a very nice tie in with my imagery," says Irving. "Its kind of an unusual way to work for me, to paint toward a thought that comes from this poem, sort of illustrating preconceived thoughts and notions of this poem."
Irving is also playing with the idea of expanding her work into other mediums, including sculpture.
"I'm working with some fabricators on possibly doing my trees in stainless steel, so the more conical trees that aren't quite as articulated," she says. "I would love to see a 20-foot tall stainless steel tree just at the entrance to a park."
The one point Irving emphasizes is her affinity for where she lives.
"I've been on the North Shore now for 17 years and then I was downtown before that," she says. "I spend quite a bit of time actually out there, either hiking and taking photographs or drawing when I'm out. It's such an advantage to live right in the place that inspires me."
