“These paintings were created from a sketchbook which chronicled a 42km hike into the backcountry in the Canadian rockies.   The work is pure paint, to be discussed as such, but the stories of the locations and the sketchbook are embedded in history.  Painters have been lured into these passes by legends, with the drive to revive them through deeply personal paint language. Whose story am I here to tell? While I hike and draw and read about these places, I string together the inspirations beyond geology and composition; from Egypt to the Canadian fur trade, the First Nations people, gold, paint, consumerism….. The escape from it all to the space of a clean white page.  Freedom. “

~Chrissy Nickerson~