The Goods from Ian Tan Gallery

Vancouver, BC | In this 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 David Pirrie, Ian Tan Gallery’s feature artist for the month of March. Pirries’s new series of paintings, Stone Canvases will be showing in the gallery from March 4-30th, with an opening reception on Saturday, March 4th, 2-4pm, where the artist will be in attendance.

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

My name is David Pirrie and I am a visual artist living and working in North Vancouver. My medium of choice is oil on canvas, usually working on a fairly large scale.

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?

I think if I were to pick a favourite piece from my new body of work I would choose the painting Mt Sir Donald, Rogers Pass BC [pictured above]. For me, this piece is a great example of my close relationship with the mountains I paint, as I just recently returned from a ski mountaineering trip to the area and skied the very glaciers depicted in the painting. It is a complex and large painting, defining the very essence of my drive to create iconic depictions of the mountains in my life.

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

If I could choose any high profile place in Greater Vancouver to have my large scale paintings displayed, I would choose somewhere prominent at YVR Airport. BC is a land of mountains, it is one of our defining features and my paintings celebrate them in a very contemporary way.

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.

Many people, including myself, have experienced my paintings in a surprisingly non-visual way. For me, it’s the overwhelming sense of place. The alpine environment is a place of deep silence; it is a place of the smell of sunbaked lichen and of alpine flowers, and the sound of cracks deep within a glacier. It is also a place of excitement and great danger, leaving us humbled by the indifference of these environments, shrugging us off like a mote of dust.

View more of David Pirrie’s artwork online here.

Ian Tan Gallery

Neighbourhood: South Granville

2655 Granville St.

604-738-1077

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