INTO THE Major Paintings The Canadian Arctic. The last great wilderness of North America and maybe even our planet. Spanning 1.5 million square kilometers, it’s a land of untamed extremes. Few ever see what lies beyond the Inuit communities that dot the land. And even fewer are artists, bringing their oil paints with them into some of of the most remote and wild corners of our planet. It is this magnificent wilderness that Cory Trépanier has explored and painted firsthand. Three extensive and exhausting painting expeditions that have led to the most unprecedented body of oil paintings to be created from Canada‘s north of our time. A time in which his canvases serve to preserve a changing landscape for generations to come. Similar to historic artists Thomas Moran and Frederic Church, Trepanier documents landscapes never before seen by the vast majority of the public, and paints places never before captured on canvas. His films add another layer to Into The Arctic, allowing audiences to experience rarely seen wilderness through his unique perspective as an artist. Trepanier’s explorations brings to his art an intimate sense of the northern landscape, and his encounters with early Arctic exploration, wildlife and the Inuit add dimensions to his art that extend beyond the aesthetic. The following presents further background into two of the major works of Into The Arctic, illustrating that Trépanier’s canvases are often more than layers of paint.

Cory Trépanier’s INTO THE ARCTIC A traveling museum exhibition of Canadian Arctic oil paintings by Cory Trépanier Produced by David J. Wagner L.L.C. 414.221.6878 [email protected] davidjwagnerllc.com Exhibition artwork, video journals, photographs, and more at: intothearctic.com Great Glacier Centrepiece of the Into The Arctic Collection Coronation Fiord, Baffin Island, , Eastern Canadian Arctic 180” x 66” (15’ x 5’5”). Below: 16” wide study for Great Glacier

Baffin Island the fifth largest island in the world, remotely situated in the Arctic Archipelago in Canada’s north. It’s a land that knows no time. This is where Trépanier began Great Glacier, the centrepiece of Into The Arctic. At 15 feet wide, Great Glacier is not only the most expansive canvas of Trepanier’s Into The Arctic collection, but quite possibly the single largest landscape painting in history to be created from Canada’s north. It’s large size matches the artist’s desire to share his experience on the land, where he was overwhelmed with the sheer scale and beauty encountered across the Arctic. In particular, he wanted to create one painting for the collection that could encapsulate that experience and immerse the viewer into the Arctic when standing before it, thus sharing sharing the sense of awe he felt while painting the study on location. It was during his travels with Inuit Guide Billy Arnaquq, from Quikiktarjuq, that he found this scene. For hours they traveled by boat to Coronation Fiord in Auyuittuq National Park where they camped. There, Trépanier explored Coronation Glacier from multiple vantage points and under a variety of conditions, all the while keeping a eye on the Polar Bear across the bay. Four kilometres wide where it meets the ocean, Coronation is lined by kilometre high mountains rising on each side. In the distance is the Penny Ice Cap, the southern most major ice cap of the Canadian Arctic that covers 6000km2 of land with a layer of ice and snow almost a kilometre thick. Glaciers are important indicators of the earth’s climate and the are being studied more than ever in order to get get a better picture of our planet’s health. While the research data grows, there often remains a disconnect from the public at large. Art like Trépanier’s Great Glacier has the unique ability to engage viewers with a visual experience that reaches past the eyes and into the mind, leaving an impression that helps to engage others with the data that is being uncovered by scientists. Coronation Glacier has been receding in recent years, adding further value to the artist’s work as a tool of preservation, documenting a land in flux.

His work has become known to some of the highest levels of scientists in the field of glaciology, including 30 year veteran Dr. Mauri S. Pelto , Associate Dean of Liberal Arts, Nichols College and director of the North Cascades Glacier Climate Project. Dr. Pelto featured Trépanier’s Great Glacier study in a post about the Penny Ice Cap retreat, writing: “To capture the majesty of the region, you have to turn to the artwork of Cory Trépanier, seen below is his Great Glacier study, not to the science data.” (link: https://glacierchange.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/penny-ice-cap-retreat-baffin-island/).

It is difficult to paint such an immense scene and convey it’s real life sense of scale. Past landscape artists known for their “great pictures”, oversized paintings by the likes Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstad and Frederic Church, often introduced human elements which served as compositional aids to that end. Though inspired by these past masters, Trépanier’s motivation for painting, preserving his experience and vision of landscapes unencumbered by human presence, prevents him from using such compositional aids. Instead, he relies on the subtle use of atmospheric and linear perspective, and creates the illusion of scale, distance and vastness though rendering of detail. He feels this is most successfully achieved when viewers respond emotionally to his paintings, and get a sense of the experience that he had while standing in the Arctic himself.

Glacierside On loan to the Embassy of Canada in Washington D.C. until 2016 Henrietta Nesmith Glacier, Quttinirpaaq National Park, , Nunavut. Canadian High Arctic 96” x 30” (8’ x 2’6”)

Early Canadian Arctic exploration has shared its rich history with American explorers since men first made footprints on the northern tundra. This evidence is clearly brought to light in the subject of Trépanier’s Glacierside painting. At the top of North America, 500 miles shy of the north pole on Ellesmere Island, Trépanier set up his easel in the middle of a polar desert that receives less an inch of rain per year. Fighting wind blown sand and keeping watchful eye for Polar Bears and Arctic Wolves, he laboured in an effort to capture the dramatic and curvaceous Henrietta Nesmith Glacier on canvas, a glacier whose sheer mass of ice creates its own cold weather system. Melt runoff flowed past him through a vast network of braided rivers, winding their way to Lake Hazen, the largest lake in North America lying north of the Arctic Circle. An impressive and moving scene to be certain, but adding to Trépanier’s experience, and encompassed in the name of the Glacier itself, lies a tale of Arctic exploration, disaster and love. During the first International Polar Year in a rush to conduct scientific research in the Arctic began. While research was indeed at hand, a secondary, underlying motivation sent men to abandon the comfort of home into the unknown, unchartered and raw north… the quest for the north pole. Leading the way for the United States was First Lieutenant Adolphus W. Greely and his Lady Franklin Bay Expedition. With a crew of 25 men, Greely and the USS Proteus made their up between Greenland and Canada, where they disembarked in Lady Franklin Bay on Ellesmere Island. They landed in August 11 of 1881, with enough provisions for 2 summers, and the Proteus returned home. Land excursions followed, attempts to reach the north pole took place, and scientific research ensued. Maps were created, features were named and unknown land became a little better known. All did not go according to plan however, and when supply ships failed to return 2 years in a row due to ice conditions, a desperate attempt was made to head south in the crew’s small boats. They found a small cache of supplies that had been dropped off at Cape Sabine, but only enough for 40 days. By now it was October, and the crew was stranded in the High Arctic, with summer giving way to a harsh and black winter to come. Their shelter: their small boats turned upside down. By spring, only 7 men were still clinging to life. Most died a slow death of starvation, freezing while in their sleep next to the other men. Rumours of cannibalism plagued the expedition for years to come. But somehow himself survived. And that happened only because of his wife back in home, insisted tenaciously for a rescue mission to be mounted, when others thought there was no hope. The sheer remoteness and harshness of the Arctic seemed render the exercise useless. Mrs. Greely however would not settle for the loss of her husband in the Arctic and thus 4 ships made their way north once again, arriving on June 22, 1884. In her honour, the stunning glacier in Trépanier’s painting was named by Adolphus after his wife... Henrietta Nesmith Glacier.