Lake of the Woods – Islands

What a fascinating project. Artist Randolph Parker and gallery owner Bill Mayberry spent five years scouting remote Lake of the Woods for inspirational sites, resulting in 220 paintings of islands in its maze of inlets and bays. They covered 2,800 km, there’s an interactive map of painting locations, and a book, launched by Mayberry Fine Art.

Mayberry spends summers at his cottage on the vast lake, which straddles the borders of Manitoba, Ontario and Minnesota. He and Parker – a friend and BC landscape painter – decided to scout the entire territory for inspirational locations. (Below: Parker with his painting Chien D’Or, part of the Islands series)

The 230-page book, Islands, reproduces the paintings and provides a history of the lake, which, at more than 70 miles long and wide, is one of the largest in North America, Below: from the Mayberry Fine Art book preview here.

The Mayberry gallery in Winnipeg exhibited the entire series last year, but a smaller selection is on exhibition through April 17 at Gallery 8 on Salt Spring Island, where Parker is based. Mayberry has placed all the paintings online, here.

Here is the interactive map of the paintings.

All the works created for Islands, the Lake of the Woods series, here

Randolph Parker website, here.

An excellent long feature on the project by Joseph Paris on Galleries West, here.