Abstract Minimalist Diptych Black & White Panel Painting Erik Atkinson Icon 1971

Abstract Minimalist Diptych Black & White Panel Painting Erik Atkinson Icon 1971. Acrylic on board with mirror and plexi glass in 2 pieces, overall 100 x 48.25 inches, signed, titled, and dated on reverse. Eric Atkinson is a major Canadian abstract landscape painter, whose extensive career as an artist and art educator straddles both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and is currently being rediscovered in England. A visual poet of the landscape, his paintings are created on the studio floor by working from all four sides of a canvas. He disrupts the picture plane, an amalgam of sand and glue, with incised calligraphic markings that suggest the natural rhythms of wind and water, of sculpted landforms created over the course of thousands of years from geological erosion – a layering of time and ancient memory. Appropriately referred to by the artist as “journeys through the landscape”, his paintings are not literal depictions, but expressions of the interpenetration of inner and outer landscapes, of the integral relationship between the processes of art making and the forces of nature, or as Atkinson states, “the forms echo the geological structure of the land and the calligraphy left by man and nature upon its surface.”