Jimy Sloan

Atlantic Park Series

Attending his grandfather's funeral in 2022, and responding to a visit to the McMichael art Gallery in Kleinberg, Ontario “ I made some sketches”. Translating these sketches into paintings became a process of inspiration and discovery while representing these in paint allowed the artist to contemplate the impact of many summer family vacations, camping and driving through Ontario and Quebec from Atlantic Canada, the interconnectedness of time and space, the role that art has had directly and indirectly in his family and on his life. While standing in the parking lot in front of the Collection in Kleinberg, and Tom Thompson’s shed, his father, a local Atlantic Canadian artist and former VANS representative, commented on how “ he had traveled to this location in the 1960s on a school bus for a day trip to the McMichael residence."...And then separately seeing Norval Morrisseau paint.

The initial phase of painting began in 2017, as a series of collaborative work started as rubbings, Impressions created on the rugged Atlantic coastline. The surface landscape itself previously shaped and sculpted by glacial force during several of the last ice ages. The standing rocks, Erratics, left scattered across the landscape bear witness. These rubbings were being created as a series of follow up canvas' to the artists' joint collaborative show ‘ Landmarks ‘ in 2016. Due to covid…the show was scrapped and the rubbings were placed into storage. These composed the first layers of the new canvas’ ….

The artists sketches created from the McMichael Collection were combined with images from the artist's garden and layered into the work, overlapping with those of the rubbings from the shoreline granite.