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Meet Christopher Friesen, Ian Tan Gallery’s April Artist of the Month

The Long Way to Get There, 2021, acrylic wash and oil on canvas, 48” x 36”

The Goods from Ian Tan Gallery

Vancouver, BC | In this new monthly series, the Ian Tan Gallery highlights one exhibiting artist or artist they represent, by asking them to answer a short four-question interview designed to introduce them to Scout readers. Meet Christopher Friesen, Ian Tan Gallery’s feature artist for the month of April…

Please introduce yourself. Who are you, where do you live, and what is your medium?

I am Christopher Friesen, an associate professor at the University of the Fraser Valley, and I live in South Langley where I have a home-based studio. I am a painter where I work primarily with acrylic and oil paints on canvas.

We know it’s hard to pick a favourite, but if you had to choose one piece from the works you have at Ian Tan Gallery to best represent your style and practice overall, which would it be and why?

The Long Way to Get There, 2021 (pictured above). This painting for me represents what I value in my painting practice. It balances abstraction and representation; it deals with line as a fundamental element and it places in dialogue our human relationship with nature. I want to make the viewer aware of the canvas’s surface and the construction of the painting by using a brightly coloured acrylic wash and then building up the painting’s elements from there.

If you could display your art in any building, establishment, or other place in Vancouver (not a gallery), where would you choose?

BC Children’s Hospital – if ever there was a place that art could impact its viewer in a fundamental way, where art can inspire, where art can play a small role in someone’s life, I would like to think this would be the place.

Art is a visual experience, but I’d like to challenge you to describe yours using the less obvious senses: sound, taste, smell and feeling.

That is officially a challenge! Imagine a cool fall afternoon, a light breeze rustles the branches and the reeds. The clean smell of the forest. You feel the low angle of the golden hour sun bathing your face in light. You breathe in this moment with a long satisfying inhale.

View more of Christopher Friesen’s artwork online here.


Neighbourhood: South Granville
2655 Granville St.
604-738-1077

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