In removing the individual mountain from the surrounding range, I decontextualize the subject, making it symbolic rather than representational. I treat the mountains like celebrities, fashioning larger than life, unattainable, beautiful, and mysterious portrayals. My interest in mountains dates back to my childhood, when my brother and I would scramble around our backyard of British Columbia’s coastal range on Vancouver’s North Shore. My reverence for these snow-capped peaks extends itself into a devotional pursuit whereby I not only paint these mountains but climb most of them as well. Recent ski mountaineering expeditions into the Grand Tetons for example give an intimate sense for the mountain range and its characteristics, forging a relationship between the images I create and my experience. My most recent body of work is mainly about the Rockies. I have spent many a climbing and ski touring/mountaineering trip to this vast area and have always come away with a special understanding of geological time. The stratification in evidence, the layering of hundreds of millions of years of sediment cannot go unnoticed, and I developed a special relationship with its complexities. I was also reminded of the importance of Canadian landscape imaging with the recent major show of Tom Thomson’s work at the LA Hammer. Featuring his iconic paintings of mountains mainly from his sojourns to the Rockies, it was curated by Steve Martin and brought fresh light to an important intersection of Canadian landscape painting. Three lines of investigation form the basis of my newer work. Exploded contour maps of the Ice fields I would use to navigate the complex mountain environment, portraits of mountains I have skied or climbed with longitude and latitude grid overlays extending the concept of relief and travel, and dot overlays on mountains as a form of plotting. Still perhaps in an experimental stage, the Map paintings take on an almost abstract quality, while retaining my rigorousness for details. In removing the individual mountain from the surrounding range, I decontextualize the subject, making it symbolic rather than representational. I treat the mountains like celebrities, fashioning larger than life, unattainable, beautiful, and mysterious portrayals. I also record their rugged features in detail, as they individually assume their own unique personalities. My use of bright monochromatic colors and dot overlay draws aesthetic and conceptual comparisons to Pop Art, implicating these colossal stone figures in the pop culture lexicon. In this light the work becomes an exercise in re-framing how we perceive the mountains; examining the function of representation and how preserving something in imagery can make it iconic. My studying and mapping of these various mountains is also a form of personal inquiry. The dots and grids may represent coordinate plotting, metaphorically pointing to the impermanence of their man-made structures that attempt to prescribe location at the intersection of human and geological time. I also paint evidence of erosion, hoping to remind us of the temporal nature of the mountains which, seemingly anchored in time, force us to acknowledge our transient existence on this earth. A Q and A with David Pirrie: If you as a viewer are new to Pirrie's work you may say, wow, this guy really loves mountains! The second comment may be, why the dots? Well, these comments or questions and others are often fielded to the artist or his gallerists by viewers. Here are some answers. 1) What inspired your paintings, and what story are you trying to tell through it? Firstly, yes, I do love mountains! I often climb and ski them. I know them rather well, in fact. All the mountains I portray are complex puzzles of route finding, hazards and discovery. Certain words or phrases often come up in the description of the mountain: sublime, ineffability, inaccessible, terrifying, heavenly. These are all great descriptors and I feel them all when in them and painting them. My story here is just that. As an interesting addition, I add the fantastically bright vibrant colors of the background and dot overlay to convey the mountain as iconic, putting it in the great pop art lexicon. There is also a neat little metaphor for mapping and coordinates. 2) How do you decide on the colors and textures in your paintings? This is kind of a two-part answer because there is the painting of the mountain, then the background and overlay. I have to admit, I am a little fussy with detail, which is evident in both. Yes, the mountain is painted in pretty exacting detail, but looking closely you can see evidence of running paint and drips, adding to a textural underlay that I use to great benefit to convey erosion and fracturing glaciers, for example. The colors of the mountain are in no way an exact replica, but I have a feel for the rocks, snow and ice, light, dark. This comes with a lot of time spent in the mountains. As for the choice of the vibrant color background and dot overlay, A: it looks really cool! B: it contemporizes the painting. It’s such a great contrast to the mountain and it typically gets chosen as an opposing hue to mess with your eyes, I’m not kidding! 3) What’s your creative process like—do you plan every detail, or do things evolve as you paint? My process is unapologetically pedestrian! Kind of kidding, but not really. What I mean is it’s pretty straightforward and broken down into steps, some very long steps! I have a pretty strong idea from the get go of what I want the painting to be, in all its time consuming detail. I have no problem with getting at it so to say. The need and inspiration is always there, and I really thrive on the exactness of the breakdown of the steps and blocking in the many layers of the painting. I do though in fact leave room for wayward thoughts and mistakes, I really have no interest in hiding the fact that it is a painting. 4) If someone is new to your work, what’s one thing you’d like them to know or feel when they see your art? Awesomeness