Born in Toronto, and raised in Southwestern, Ontario, painter Jeff Willmore has been an active member of the London art scene since the late 1970s. Despite forays into sculpture, installation and performance, painting has remained central to his practice.
Steeped in the tradition of Canadian landscape painting, Willmore has long produced quick, plein air sketches on board, later transforming them into expansive studio paintings on scraped and gouged plywood panels. In recent years, Willmore’s paintings have become increasingly spare in their execution, moving away from a more traditional approach to landscapes, and marking a critical shift in his creative practice.
The works featured in Interpolating Landscape demonstrate his growing penchant for composite imagery (that is, single scenes compiled from two or more source images), thus situating his work within the changing environment of contemporary image-making brought on by the advent of digital technologies. In the process, they question how representation alters and shapes our perception of reality, collapsing the boundaries between experience and representation in an increasingly media-saturated world.