Steven Nederveen

The son of a florist and an avid gardener, who is also painter (my mother), as well as the son of a life-long sailor (my father), I was born to love the land and the oceans.

My formal education took place at the University of Alberta, where I received a Bachelor of Design in 1995. The following year, I moved to Vancouver, where I lived between the mountains and ocean. I hiked, sailed, and I undertook a committed practice of meditation. It was during this time that I began exploring the sense of the sacred I feel in natural settings – it was impossible not to be affected. This is where I found inspiration to use painting as a means of drawing connections between the natural environment and spirituality.

Currently, I live in Ontario with Christine and our sons, Otto & Hugo. I continue to travel extensively, photographing places that feel alive to me, recording the presences there and then re-imagining that world through a combination of digital and painterly processes. By blurring the lines between photography and painting, I have developed a magical realism that I hope inspires others to see the world with enchanted eyes.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Most of the photographic elements were taken on and around Mount Baker in Washington. I spent 2 weeks last summer doing hikes up various mountains with my mom and dad. These brief visits that I spend with my parents mean a great deal to me and are usually a source of funny anecdotes. My dad's 81 now and has been an old-school outdoorsman his whole life. He surveyed a lot of northern BC and Alberta, and is full of interesting stories about wildlife encounters and difficult and dangerous manoeuvring with vehicles and helicopters. Today, his adventures are less extreme and both my parents are still outdoor enthusiasts. My dad starts his summer by sliding into a pair of rainbow coloured flip flops, (which he found and then fixed with a needle and dental floss), then packs a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and heads up the trail. My mother (75) follows at a slower pace in her soft pink and mint sweat suit (which she got in Hawaii in the 70's) and a walking stick. The scene looks completely absurd when they are traversing a washed out trail on a sheer vertical face or knee deep in a swamp, trudging their way through cat tails and fallen trees, stopping now and then to inspect some flowers or an interesting piece of wood. My dad also spends 4 months of the year living on his sailboat, navigating his way up and down the gulf islands.

I've grown up with, and adopted for myself, this wonderful ease and enjoyment from nature walks and spending time on the water. The feelings of being grounded and expansive on these outings are so rich that it's easy to make spiritual associations to it. This latest series of paintings are largely about the mystical energy of nature and revealing of a hidden magical world. I've made many of the landscape scenes less about location and more about the boundaries between reality and mystical happenings. It's like only certain people can see that another magical world co-exists with this familiar world. Most of the occurrences happen in the skies, where unusual atmospheric events and swirling energies turn familiar scenes into something other worldly. In the way that animals detect danger in the air before we do, I use flocks of birds as both messengers and bringers of these events. It's intentionally unclear if the swirling lines are flight paths of the birds or some electrical storm that has brought this other world to us. It is up to the viewer to decide what these events are about, whether they're friendly, spiritual or threatening.

In a way, I also try to capture the emotional memory of a place instead of a documentary style image. This allows for a scene to be coloured by our experience, highlighting some features while others fade away or meld into some other vague memory. In the way that our minds can fuse together different memories into one event, I've made most of my landscapes from different views along the journey, adding a path here, removing trees there.