Garry Curtis Berteig

The landscape, writing and abstraction have always been part of Berteig's repetoire. Berteig has often found his imagery in the landscape. With his distinctive composition, Berteig forces the viewer to confront both real and abstract at the same time which puts into the question the reality of the landscape portion of the image as much as the significance of the abstract bands. Berteig presents the viewer with the beauty of nature as he found it in his many treks through the Boreal forest of Northern Alberta, the Rocky Mountains or in the northern fjords of Norway. He offers his authentic version, his vision of the present, along with the reminder that this same reality can be admired and appreciated for something greater than the simple expression of what we see. Bertieg's work, with its combination of real and abstract, is not so quick to posit one over the other but to say that only in the combined experience of real and abstract can we discover the symbolic, the ideas and beliefs that define our contemporary world.

Midnight Sun - 1993
acrylic on paper, 22 in x 30 in