The savage beauty of the untamed Ontario landscape has inspired the work of many modern Canadian painters. Alan Glicksman is one of those talented painters.

Alan has sacrificed none of the fierce emotional energy of his best figurative canvases, instead he redirects it, in an embrace of Georgian Bay’s brooding, stormy realm of rocks, blue inlets, flowers and skies.

Glicksman begins with paint sketches en plein air. These quick little pictures are accomplished paintings in their own right; touched by an edgy, primal vitality where the land is alive, agitated from within by the forces of growth, struggle, harsh weather and the passage of geologic time.

In translating these insights into large studio canvases, Glicksman has carried over all the urgency of the small pieces. Fields of flowers and grasses explode in great clouds of paintwork.

Alan Glicksman’s landscape paintings come with a promise and a summons: that we, too, can see nature as it is, in all its novelty and life-giving intensity.

John Bentley Mays