Toronto painter Kim Dorland recently showed Calgary viewers his latest paintings from a residency in Emma Lake, Saskatchewan. The glowing paintings showed off well in the natural light of Skew Gallery. Canadian Content is Dorland's third solo exhibition at Skew, where he was first introduced to Calgary in 2005. Dorland's paintings are well known in Canada and abroad for their push and pull between representation and abstraction using a bright palette and thick paint, and for their melancholic yet mundane subject matter.

With past series like Over the Fence from 2007, Dorland worked from photographs of suburban life from around Alberta and Saskatchewan, where he grew up. At the Emma Lake Workshop, Dorland found he enjoyed working directly from nature: "The challenge was to make paintings that weren't too beautiful. Working with nature - especially in such an amazing and pretty place like Emma Lake can be very awe inspiring and I had to force myself to avoid being seduced by beauty and make works with a certain kind of psychology to change the tone of the works."

Dorland imbued these plein air studies and larger landscapes with a narrative about Tom Thomson, arguably Canada's most famous painter. With the addition of scenes from the painter's mythical life and mysterious death, the paintings begin to take on a darker tone.

He speculates in the paintings "Seconds Before" and "July 8, 1917" what really happened the day of the painter's death at a lake in Algonquin Park. In "Seconds Before" Thomson's tiny silhouette emits a stream of pee off a boat in the middle of the lake. The painting's apparent humor is nuanced by sympathy when taking into account Dorland's respect for Thomson. Says Dorland, "He should have lived longer so he could make more paintings - his death was a tragic loss for this country."

Dorland pays homage to Thomson by emphasizing techniques common to both artists such as the thick painting technique and the red or high chrome under-painting, as well as representing subject matter such as pines, canoes and lakes from Thomson's well-known oeuvre. However in classic Dorland style (not seeing the forest for the trees), we find graffiti on tree bark and bottles on the ground leftover from bush parties.

The Canadian Content paintings resemble Anselm Keifer's or Eugene Leroy's paintings in their sculptural dimension although they retain a clear cut representational quality through contrast and decisive strokes. Masses of paint made from scrunched up layers of thin acrylic paint or globs of oil are fixed or nailed to earlier layers. It's not unusual for Dorland to find the paint fallen off the canvas onto the floor in his studio. Dorland has always used excessive paint to confront the viewer with the reality of the medium. He says, "The vocabulary of paint is always in my work - I'm always looking to push the material in new, interesting and often extreme ways. It's the most challenging and interesting part of what I do - How to make the material define subject, create narrative, and also open up its own discourse all at the same time."

Looking at how material defines subject in this body of work, there's a connection between the mounds of thick black oils and fluorescent strokes or backgrounds, and a chemically devastated or "psychically charged" landscape. But there is also a distinctly Canadian heritage of landscape painting that the artist wants to explore: "We love thick paint. Lots of paint piled up on little wood panels depicting heroic landscapes cover our national museum walls. I wanted to find a way to use this regional dialect in my work because it's problematic and beautiful at the same time." Dorland's twist on the heroic landscape tradition is the inclusion of people and their mark on an otherwise beautiful thing.