James Williamson Galloway Macdonald, more commonly known as Jock Macdonald, emigrated in 1926 from the UK to Vancouver, Canada, where he assumed the position of head of design at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design). Prior to coming to Canada, Macdonald, who graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art in 1922, had worked in commercial design and then as the head of design at the Lincoln School of Art.

Upon Macdonald’s arrival in Vancouver, although extremely skilled in textile design, he had done little painting. Fortunately for Macdonald, Frederick Varley, a member of the Group of Seven, had also been recently appointed to the faculty of the Vancouver school. It was Varley who encouraged Macdonald to turn his attention to landscape painting. Macdonald responded with a series of extremely accomplished images of the landscape around his Vancouver home.

Varley encouraged both his students and his colleagues to sketch outdoors. Macdonald took up the challenge of painting the British Columbia landscape, and particularly the coastal mountains, with enthusiasm. 6000 Feet Up is a remarkably confident image of the mountainous terrain north of Vancouver. The vivid sweep of the land, combined with the subtle depiction of the sunlight illuminating the rugged terrain, gives the image a memorable immediacy.

Macdonald clearly wants the viewer to experience the vitality of the natural world with the same force that he felt it. The whole scene is illuminated from the left by sunlight, which streams across the mountains, trees and lakes. Subtle shadows define the trees and slopes on the left side of the image and allow Macdonald to convincingly suggest the recession into the distance. The shadows are cast from left to right and allow strong definition of both the foreground (note the shadows cast by the two closest groups of trees) and the distant mountainscape (the variation in the treatment of the central background mountain is particularly striking). The right side of the image is brighter, but Macdonald has been careful to suggest a gentle rather than blazing sunlight.

One of the most notable elements of this work is Macdonald’s treatment of the water in the two lakes. The surfaces of the water are richly varied. The artist’s use of shadow and different colours to suggest both sunlight on the surface and the water’s changing depth is especially noteworthy.

6000 Feet Up is a commanding and confident image, one which suggests how deeply Macdonald responded to the landscape of British Columbia.