Jim Park

Jim Park’s ongoing series surveys his profound interest in natural places. His primary goal is to unravel the relationship between one place and another, between what he can see and what is obscured by darkness. His paintings essentially function as a tangible record of his mental and emotional experiences, walking through these landscapes, which he then re-creates onto canvas.

“Landscape is something that everyone can relate to using their own knowledge and experience. I try to make a work of art sensitive to the local culture and highlight the uniqueness of the geographic features. I am inspired by the impact of light (natural or man-made) on a form, a figure or a pattern. Hence, I've been experimenting with rendering light on canvas, since early days. I find light in many landscape settings very attractive because it contains both enigma and discovery at the same time.”

Park implements accidental, swift and fluid mark-making techniques in his work, and tries to approach each painting without any set of formula, in an effort to simplify the process, and be faithful to the creative evolution of each individual work.

“By observing the environments and structures seen around the west coast of BC, I try to bring together sensibilities and techniques which I apply to create my own atmospheric landscape, lively wave paintings and seascapes. In my work, I try to suggest a sensory experience of the landscape, mimicking the passing of time.”

In Park’s process he works from sketches, collected over months of sketchbook drawings or from photographs. He selects the strongest images he feels are fit for painting. His goal is to create works that are translations from the original experience of an occasion, a moment, or a meeting, and then turn them into another set of experiences involving the activity of painting.

“I try to re-construct a set of equivalent colours and shapes, and I would labour endlessly on reworking paints until I feel certain that they are exactly what I wanted to achieve visually. As the painting evolves, I feel that it’s necessary to make the marks I use more and more resonant or expressive of the feeling that I started out with.”

Born in 1978 in South Korea, Jim Park grew up in a small city of Pohang. He moved to Canada at the age of thirteen and attended high school in Abbotsford, BC. His father a metallurgical engineer and his mother a piano teacher, were both incredibly supportive with his decision to become an artist early on. He completed his BFA at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, in 2003. Jim Park currently lives and works in Vancouver, BC. His work is collected both publicly and privately in Canada and U.S.