London artist’s new exhibition captures quiet beauty of Southwestern Ontario’s back roads

For London, Ont., artist Craig Guthrie, the fields and back roads surrounding southwestern Ontario are more than scenery glimpsed through a car window.

“These are the outskirts,” Guthrie told CBC London Morning host Andrew Brown. “The roads we drive when we have left home but not yet arrived where we are going.”

That idea is at the heart of Outskirts: Landscapes From the Road, Guthrie’s new solo exhibition opening this week at LAB 203 inside the TAP Centre for Creativity.

The exhibition runs from Tuesday to June 6, with a public opening reception on Thursday from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Guthrie, a resident artist at TAP and longtime senior scenic artist at London’s Grand Theatre, said the paintings represent a shift from his previous work, which he described as more dramatic and visually flashy.

“These landscapes are different,” he said. “They’re quiet, they’re soft. Sometimes the palette is really limited.”

Many of the works were inspired by photographs Guthrie took while driving rural roads around the London region. He said he intentionally photographed the scenes from inside the vehicle so viewers would feel as though they were travelling through the landscape themselves.

One painting featuring hydro lines stretching across a snowy farm field reflects the kind of understated beauty Guthrie hopes people notice more often.

“There’s this kind of feeling that you’ve left London, then yadda yadda yadda, an hour later you arrive where you’re going,” he said. “We take for granted that time in between.”

Guthrie said the landscapes of southwestern Ontario are often overshadowed by more dramatic scenery elsewhere in Canada, but believes the region has a distinct beauty of its own.

“Nothing else looks quite like this,” he said. “I don’t think we necessarily connect that this is our landscape, but it really is.”

Despite his years of experience, Guthrie admitted the exhibition feels especially personal.

“This feels very vulnerable for me,” he said. “I hope these images that you’ve never seen before feel like you’ve seen them every day of your life.”