This Kim Dorland painting, NFLD, exemplifies the artist’s signature approach to reimagining the Canadian landscape through a charged interplay of texture, colour, and psychological tension. Dorland is widely recognized for his dense impasto, fluorescent underlayers, and use of both traditional and non traditional materials - a technique that redefines the painterly surface into something sculptural and visceral. In this particular work, the thick application of paint, pushed and dragged across the canvas, generates a turbulent field of marks that blend abstraction with hints of foliage, shadow, and organic motion. The result is a surface alive with contradictions: chaotic yet controlled, luminous yet brooding.

Dorland’s interest in the Canadian wilderness and the psychological spaces it occupies is central to his practice. His landscapes often explore the uneasy boundary where nature meets memory. The painting’s subdued tonalities, interspersed with flashes of bright pigment, evoke an environment that is at once inviting and disorienting. This duality reflects Dorland’s ongoing engagement with themes of awe, fear, and displacement within natural settings, echoing his stated fascination with the Canadian landscape it intersects with contemporary experience.

NFLD presents a striking, high contrast landscape composed of dense, vertically oriented trees rendered in Dorland’s signature impasto technique. Heavy layers of green, black, and yellow paint form an almost tactile forest, where the foliage appears to vibrate with energy. Above the forest, a vivid red sky dominates the composition. The transition between treetops and sky is marked by flecks of orange and hints of lighter green, giving the impression of backlit foliage or the suggestion of atmospheric glow. This work exemplifies Dorland’s ability to transform familiar landscapes into psychologically charged, immersive visual experiences.

Please note: this work is unframed.