Iceberg, 1974

In 1976 Parkin worked on the exhibition Changing Visions: The Canadian Landscape, with Nina Wright. She selected the artists for the show and contributed to the catalogue. It featured notable Canadian artists who were reimagining the country’s quintessential vistas. Iceberg was among the show’s highlights, and Ewen soon became one of Parkin’s favourite painters.

“Changing Visions was a travelling exhibition organized by the Edmonton Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario. It went to eight or nine venues across the country. It was created to look at landscape in a new way—beyond the stereotypes of Tom Thomson’s empty wilderness and Emily Carr’s dramatic trees. Not that those works aren’t important but others, like Paterson Ewen, were seeing the country’s landscape in a totally different way.

“Paterson Ewen is one of my favourite artists because of the strength in his vision about the power of nature, forcefully expressed through line and colour and by gouges made into the plywood surface of the work.

“I went absolutely crazy for Iceberg by Paterson Ewen—its sweeping movement and vast horizon—because it is such a contrast to how Canadians typically pictured paintings of icebergs, usually as Lawren Harris painted them. For me this work is as much about creation as it is about destruction. Ewen sees the beauty of nature but also how it is in danger and finite.”