THREE TAKES ON THE LAND: BERG, BEAMISH, WALMSLEY

Parting Clouds at Fields End, Stefan Berg, 2025

By Rebeccah Love

From its earliest incarnations, landscape painting has been bound to the practical needs of society—engineers sketching blueprints for complex hydraulic systems in prehistoric communities, or rulers commissioning depictions of their expanding territories to assert control, divine authority, and power. As the centuries unfolded, these utilitarian beginnings gave way to new intentions: in the Netherlands, landscape erupted as an independent subject, capturing the everyday beauty of a newly mercantile world. Later, the Impressionists transformed the genre once more, embracing light, leisure, and the hedonistic joy of seeing—their canvases became meditations on perception and the divine nature of the visible.

Today, artists such as Stefan Berg, Chuck Beamish, and Ben Walmsley continue to expand this lineage, drawing from the traditions of Canadian outdoorsman painters while forging deeply personal explorations of place. Their works are not overtly political nor burdened by ecological didacticism, though subtle nods to such concerns may linger in their compositions. Rather, their focus rests on memory, identity, and the enduring power of observation—sometimes painting en plein air, often returning to locations rich with personal resonance. Through their attentive gaze, the supposed demise of landscape painting is revealed as a myth. Their canvases, currently hanging at the United Contemporary Gallery, affirm that the genre remains vital, luminous, and filled with joy—a living testament to the continuing dialogue between painter and place.

Very few traces of human activity can be spotted in the canvases of these three artists: a distant windmill under blueberry skies in Berg’s Sunrise, the subtlest little hint of red peeking through the trees in his Baseline, possibly indicating a barn. The roads, of course, a tractor’s trajectory imprinted into the ploughed field. In Beamish’s paintings, almost no trace of human activity exists, save a well-loved dock edging the shoreline, possibly suggesting the existence of a summer property. Very little reference to humans appears in Walmsley’s work, unless you interpret the sand’s dips as footprints in his CC2VII. All three painters, then, seem to be conjuring impossibly edenic, transcendent places, full of natural movements of wind and moving skies, but hauntingly quiet of human life.

Stefan’s canvases sparked many conversations in what seemed to be a dramatic shift in subject matter. A painter whose reputation had been established in many Toronto circles as an image-maker carrying within his heart an extraordinary love of Toronto architecture, his paintings in the past couple of years have celebrated beloved Toronto landmarks and highways in the Don Valley area and extended East End. But the artist is quick to remind his community that Bruce County has always played a significant role in his development, having painted en plein air with his father as a young person. If anything, this show is a return to his roots.

Stefan’s playfulness is hard to ignore. It’s not just that he is playing with bigness and smallness in his depictions of furrowed fields, sometimes sitting beneath clear skies and sometimes under elegant clouds—the viewer can see so clearly that this is an artist who is having fun in his practice, sometimes working en plein air and sometimes out of his studio. One of his littlest pieces, depicting the tiniest windmills beneath a blueberry sky, recalls a delicate painting he showed months ago, depicting the National Ballet of Canada dancers seen through the window, in a similar colour palette. Stefan is clearly a master of the large, dominant canvases that enchanted patrons of the gallery on opening night (Parting of Clouds at Field’s End, Field After Berg, both of which echo the feelings of the Romantic Landscape Tradition, or maybe the Hudson River School). But he also seems to delight in capturing much more modest little scenes in smaller canvases. There is a sacredness and secretness to these unknown little corners of rural Ontario; you can picture children discovering these small sanctums where their imaginations would take flight. His scenes do not depict wild nature but more contained, controlled, landscaped—in these optimistic portrayals of rustic farmland. Berg remains a national treasure whose works are not quite filled with whimsy, but rather a kind of joyful inventiveness that invites viewers into exciting worlds, his thoughtful approach to visual storytelling leading to such delight.

Sunrise, Stefan Berg, 2022

In Chuck Beamish’s canvases, we bounce between Rocky Mountain and Algonquin lakes. He brings us through icy winter and warmer summer days at the lake. His mountain ranges stand proud, majestic, intimidating at times, capturing a kind of powerful loneliness or timelessness. There is a poetry and humility in his water scenes, sometimes with muted autumnal foliage slowly appearing on the horizon trees, or else slivers of light peeking through the forest where a winding, frigid river leads to the unknown.

Chuck’s brushstrokes betray a rougher depiction of an untamed wilderness, suggesting something more primal and organic at play. Aside from the straight cottage dock carefully constructed by human hands, there are no tidy or orderly elements in Chuck’s imagery. It seems to all conjure the wild chaos of nature, betraying in many moments Chuck’s own expansive and exciting imagination: there is no room here for convention, only a dynamic and unbounded process capturing an ever-changing landscape with his human eye.

The anchor painting of the show, Cold Inhale (Cloud on Snow, Cedar Lake), poses many questions. A playfully pink cotton candy cloud hovers above a frozen lake: is it inspiring childlike wonder? Or is it ominous and intimidating? An enormous figure, almost personified, the emotional impact of this image is intensive, though this cloud carries within its unusual pink hue an infinite number of messages.

Depicting a hauntingly beautiful world, one that was here well before we arrived and that will be here well after we leave, Beamish’s images remind his viewers of our own fleeting moments passing through these vistas—places that will change over time but that ultimately exist as more permanent fixtures, much more permanent than we will ever pretend to be.

Cold Inhale (Cloud on Snow, Cedar Lake), Chuck Beamish, 2025

Ben Walmsley has been building off of his own symbology in his paintings, hinting at the Group of Seven, specifically Tom Thomson, in his brushstrokes. Making use of an impasto style, Walmsley’s figurative landscapes are accompanied by a colour chart beneath his images. His palette bounces between subtle forest greens, white snow, and vibrant yellow-orange sunsets. His images bring us through winter, spring, and summer, sometimes sharing with us a meditative lily pad or the motion of a fast car through a field of green. Other scenes depict cheerful winter forests or ominous beaches.

CC2V, Ben Walmsley, 2023

In creating a conversation between figurative (the landscape) and abstract (the colour chart) painting, Ben distills his landscapes into a more digestible format, reminding his viewers that all images are, in many ways, made up of simpler elements: our fields of vision are made up of depth, an orchestration of light, contrast, texture, and motion, but most of all, colour! Combined by the mind into the seamless experience of a landscape!

Meditative, nostalgic, evoking such a profound love of place, Ben’s unique imagery generously carries his viewers to places of deep contemplation and memory, reminding each viewer of nature’s magical alchemy.

Between the three of them, Stefan Berg, Chuck Beamish, and Ben Walmsley conjure a renewed enthusiasm for the beautiful mysteries of the natural world. In removing virtually all human presence from their images, all three artists encourage their viewers to consider a natural backdrop without human activity, places of great serenity and divine beauty. In considering the role of landscape painting today in 2025, these artists don’t necessarily offer answers but more riddles. The longer we consider their pastoral pieces, the more we begin to understand that the natural world is not ours to master, but to behold and revere.

Stefan Berg, Chuck Beamish and Ben Walmsley are currently exhibiting at United Contemporary Gallery, until November 22.

www.unitedcontemporary.com