Chris Stoffel Overvoorde: the Alberta Drawings August 3, 2010

In the summer of 1993 Chris Stoffel Overvoorde traveled to Alberta, Canada as part of the University of Lethbridge Artist in Residency Program. During this period, which he describes this as the most intense two months of his life as an artist, Overvoorde completed forty oil sketches, forty watercolors, and sixty drawings. He found the wide-open space of the Canadian prairie inspirational, and has returned there seven times since. "When you stand in a field of grain, and you see nothing else of miles but a faint distant horizon, you get a new perspective on who you are in relation to nature and how you are related to God." Overvoorde's drawings of the Alberta prairie record the relationships of atmosphere, light, value, proportion, and scale. Each of the drawings is square in format, presenting a challenge to the artist, as it denies the natural horizontal format of the landscape itself. Overvoorde found that the square belongs unnaturally to the prairie because man has taken the expanse of the prairie and superimposed upon its natural contours a subdivision of square-mile sections. The square drawings, then, are indicative of an art problem, while also reflecting man's interaction with the prairie.