Man Eating Landscape; Forbidden Plateau from Comox Lake Painting

A watercolour painting on a sheet of Arches 22"x30" watercolour paper depicting a view of the world on my doorstep; toward Forbidden Plateau and the rugged interior of Vancouver Island and Strathcona Park viewed from Comox Lake. On Vancouver Island, just beyond the tarmac, the strip malls, residential neighbourhoods, and industrial subdivisions that hug the island's coast, is a landscape that swallows humans whole. Aircraft disappear off the radar, and skiers, hikers and hunters disappear without a trace. This is a landscape that transfixes and repels; a mix of beauty and terror, complex terrain with peaks, chasms, impenetrable forest, pillars of vapour, glaciers, rock fall, avalanches and unpredictable weather. When you enter this world you feel profoundly vulnerable and mortal confronting the blind uncaring forces of nature that might at any moment smite you. It is a man eating landscape.