Clint Hunker's Rural Saskatchewan

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Clint Hunker, "Summer Clouds Scatter," 2016

oil on linen, 9" x 12"

Clint Hunker regularly gathers his brushes and heads out of Saskatoon to paint what he calls the “utilitarian landscape” – the humble fields, alkaline sloughs and run-down grid roads within a 30-mile radius of the town of Aberdeen.

“I don’t really think of them as landscapes,” says Hunker, who has taught art at the University of Saskatchewan since 1987. “I think of them as the recording of environments and events. As soon as you start using the word landscape, you’re talking about this tradition of the picturesque that comes from Europe. I’m really trying to examine the landscape as it is now, the environment as it is now, in its present state and not through the filters of some of those historical movements.”

Hunker’s subdued and moody landscapes are part of a three-person show on view until Feb. 23 at The Gallery / Art Placement. He is showing with Lorna Russell, a mentor he started painting with as a teenager, and the late Reta Cowley. They are part of Saskatchewan’s strong tradition of landscape painting that also includes artists like Dorothy Knowles and David Alexander, the latter now based in the B.C. Interior.

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Clint Hunker, "Marsh Road; West Towards the Slough," 2016

oil on linen, 9" x 11.5"

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Clint Hunker, "Alkaline Lake from the Flooded Old 27 Highway," 2016

oil on linen, 10" x 13"

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Clint Hunker, "Marsh Road; Late Afternoon Winter Light," 2016

oil on linen, 10" x 12"

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Unlike many landscape painters of the last few decades, Hunker works small, often on linen little larger than a student’s notebook. His favourite seasons are at the cusp of the prairie’s voluminous summers. “There’s something about the combination of these quiet, big skies in relation to the very simplified landscape that happens in spring and fall,” he says. “It’s hard to capture. It’s very melancholy, but centred at the same time.”

Hunker tries to complete each painting in one or two sittings without reworking it in the studio. “I tend to take it to a certain point, and leave it,” he says. “So there are small glitches. There are small issues with composition or colour. It’s very seldom that I actually fiddle with those kinds of things because I feel the larger energy and the emotion that comes out of the direct experience makes the painting stronger.

“As soon as you start to make it more perfect, you’re losing some of that energy. So sometimes my paintings are a little rough but I just think of it as a kind of honesty and authenticity in response to the landscape.”

Hunker, who is also represented by the Burgera Matheson Gallery in Edmonton, earned a Master’s degree from the University of Saskatchewan. His pastels were included in The Heart as a Way, a 2002 show at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon that included Lorna Russell and Doris Wall Larson.