A conversation with Douglas Coupland

For his most recent exhibit at the Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto, Coupland—who’s known for bringing technology into his canvases and installations—did something he had never done before: He created a group of paintings on canvas, all done entirely by hand. The result is The New Ice Age, a series which references works from the Group of Seven—a revered community of 20th-century Canadian landscape painters—while exploring issues of climate change, retro pop culture and mortality. During a quick break from painting his next collection, Coupland spoke to Experience about his current artistic motivations.

For those who were coming of age in the 1990s, writer, designer and visual artist Douglas Coupland was considered a cultural prophet following the release of his debut novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. It was then that the German-born, Vancouver-raised multihyphenate popularized the now-iconic nomenclature for the cohort of people born between the mid-1960s and 1980. Over the next three decades, Coupland went on to publish 14 novels alongside collections of short fiction and non-fiction, and has manifested his signature wit and boyish wonder in more than 20 exhibitions of visual art worldwide. His diverse works in public spaces have broken all kinds of records—his 2009 aluminum and stainless steel sculpture titled Digital Orca, which sits beside the Vancouver Convention Centre, is one of the most photographed works of art in Canadian history. Honors such as being made a member of France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and an Officer of the Order of Canada have followed but they have not slowed him down. For his most recent exhibit at the Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto, Coupland—who’s known for bringing technology into his canvases and installations—did something he had never done before: He created a group of paintings on canvas, all done entirely by hand. The result is The New Ice Age, a series which references works from the Group of Seven—a revered community of 20th-century Canadian landscape painters—while exploring issues of climate change, retro pop culture and mortality. During a quick break from painting his next collection, Coupland spoke to Experience about his current artistic motivations.

What was the impetus for The New Ice Age? 

Sadly, my mom died, and I took stock of life and realized that there’s no real work I’ve released out into the world that came directly from my brain through my central nervous system. This means no work which was made from my hand with a paintbrush onto a surface. If someone important in your life is gone, you’re obviously going to change, and you just don’t know what that change is going to be. I was 60 and instead of traveling as much as I did—I used to do around 10,000 miles a month—I stayed put and worked in the studio and painted. 

Like this show, so much of your past work also references icebergs. Why have they been such a longtime fascination of yours?

They’re attached to parental memories. I’ve been doing these tessellated Group of Seven pieces for a long time but never like this or with this kind of intimacy. I returned to them after I was flying back from Munich and saw icebergs as I was going over Greenland. My dad was a fighter-jet pilot in the Air Force and when he went to civilian, he had a few float planes, which he leased out to local port-based airlines. We’d go up the coast and get to Alaska and we’d see glaciers calving and leave big icebergs. Seeing them up close feels like nothing else. Doing this series also made me think of working with Lawren Harris’s work too.

In your artist’s statement, you mention that you feel the world’s icebergs are all under a spell. Are these new paintings a way to understand, reverse or broadcast the spell?

All three. I always like to say, there are a lot of pieces I create which represent a kind of toxic beauty in them. They are like poison candy. I think that the ones that were in the show bring that spell to the surface and make people acknowledge what’s going on with climate issues. Instead of talking about the elephant in the room, you can look at the painting and see the elephant in the room. 

Let’s talk about the names of these paintings. Lavender Peace and French’s Mustard with Strawberry Sauce are two knockout titles. What inspired the humorous designations for pieces that reference canonical artists like the Group of Seven?

The Group of Seven was a long time ago—even though I’m almost amazed people talk about them as if they happened last week. But it all happened a hundred years ago. I think revisiting them in this way brings things into this century. French’s Mustard with Strawberry Sauce was an experiment in color, but it also works as a statement on the overwhelming burden of over-documented history. The mustard piece pokes upon that need to make everything dramatic or make everything bigger than what it is. 

I’d like to discuss how you think of painting as a clear record of your central nervous system. Why this push towards something so tactile? 

Most everything I’ve done up until recently has been using cameras, photography, mechanical stuff, machine fabrication or what have you. When I began painting with a brush and with my hands, I began developing more muscles—muscles you need to hold a brush on a vertical surface. It’s like chopping vegetables. There’s a technique that you accrue over time. I did throw out the first six months of work I made but now I’m up to speed. My technique’s better and each painting is an adventure because when you make a mistake, it can be interesting. The process also forces you to wait for paint to dry and overthink things, which I like.

Your past work with the fashion brand Valentino used the phrase “Beauty has kind of become an act of rebellion.” Can you tell me why, in your mind, beauty is radical?

Institutions of higher learning train you how to do subjective work on your own—whether it’s writing or whether it’s doing anything creative, it’s become so incredibly orthodox and inflexible in terms of what you’re allowed to do. I think that orthodoxy has probably destroyed the creative life of so many people who otherwise probably would’ve gone on to do really great things. This applies to fashion and art. Beautiful things do not need rules. I think we should just make what we’re going to make and face the repercussions and critics that come with it. 

You wrote a humorous piece for The Guardian and called yourself an app. Do you still equate your life with an app?

No. I’m off the app thing. I think there’s this whole neo-surrealism that a lot of young people are getting into, which happens with AI programs, and I’m working against that. If you want to see a duck eating a plate of spaghetti on the top of Mount Everest… vroom, vroom, you order this image into an AI program and there you have it. With hand painting, I think it’s a way of bypassing that and relying on my skill and my central nervous system and seeing if they deliver or don’t deliver.

Your next wave of paintings will focus on trees and forestry. Is there anything that is affecting the way you view them?

I live in a house surrounded by 100-foot trees. I grew up surrounded by trees. I hope that the work that comes out of it can become a time capsule rather than being merely transient.