Eddy Frankel is a London-based art critic. His writing has been published by The Guardian, ArtReview, The Art Newspaper and Vanity Fair, among others. He is the founder of OOF, a magazine and gallery dedicated to art and football.
Not long after the pandemic hit, in a moment of freedom between lockdowns, Douglas Coupland was on a transatlantic flight from the UK to his home in Canada. It’s a journey he had been making for decades, but when he looked out of the window at the vast, familiar ice-scapes of Greenland, something seemed amiss. “This time, the icebergs, something was wrong with them,” he says from his studio in Vancouver. “They looked like they’d had a spell put on them, a hex, they weren’t icebergs as we once knew them.”
The ultra-influential, generation-defining writer and artist knew then that he had found his latest muse. Coupland has gone on to produce scores of iceberg paintings, semi-abstract visions of haunted landscapes caught in the process of devastating erosion. “When you’re painting icebergs, all you’re painting is water and ice, there’s nothing else. For the first six months or so I just destroyed everything trying to get my mojo going, and then it became really obsessive.”
Douglas Coupland in his studio, photography by Keagan Archer, courtesy of Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto
These are paintings imbued with a kind of shock and fear at the present state of the world that will be familiar to anyone who has read classic Coupland novels like Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture or Microserfs. When talking about the works, which will be the subject of a solo presentation at Independent with Toronto gallery Daniel Faria, he veers off into thoughts about genetically modified corn fields, Monsanto, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, earthquakes; the paintings are quite literal depictions of Coupland’s own climate anxiety. “We used to go up and down the coast here in British Columbia on these great trips up to the Arctic. Icebergs were just icebergs back then, and now they’re something else.”
It becomes clear that this mutation is as much psychological as it is physical. As scientists sound the alarm about melting glaciers accelerating global sea level rise, Coupland can no longer look at icebergs without thinking of ecological collapse and humanity’s role in the destruction of the planet.
Douglas Coupland, The First Iceberg Reaches Miami, 2024, courtesy of Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto
Douglas Coupland, Deepest Winter Moon, 2024, courtesy of Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto
Douglas Coupland, Cranberry Iceberg, 2024, courtesy of Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto
The iceberg paintings can be seen as a break with Coupland’s own aesthetic past. The visual art he made his name with in the early 2000s (he trained as a sculptor in the 1980s but spent most of the following decades writing) was all bold, confrontational figuration, filled with toys and QR codes, Pop Art allusions, and endless postmodern referentialism. Comparatively, the iceberg paintings look restrained, almost traditional. Did making them feel like a conscious shift? “Oh god, absolutely. I’ve been doing visual art since 1999, and all of it was in some way mediated by technology. So it became very important that I do painting that’s entirely from my brain only.”
But the underlying reason for this change is as personal as it is artistic. “If you lose someone important in your life, about 14 or 15 months later, you’re going to change as a human being. You don’t know quite how, but you will. My mother died and about 14 months later I said, ‘you have to stop using machines, you have to start using your brain, electric signals going through your muscles, bones on the wood, bristles, paint, surface.’ I think having a trace of my central nervous system on a surface became important, then it became addictive, and it remains addictive.”
Coupland fans will also be aware that his writing has taken a backseat to his visual art for the past decade (his last novel, Worst.Person.Ever., came out in 2013). “My brain stopped writing the day after I got my Covid vaccination,” he says with slight trepidation. “It’s just gone and it’s never come back, and I've had to make some kind of peace with that. The ease has gone. Was it a coincidence? Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t.”
Douglas Coupland, Exxon Valdez, 2023, courtesy of Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto
I suggest that perhaps it’s not a vaccine that has pulled him away from writing, but a newfound dedication to painting that has consumed all of his creative impulses. After all, didn’t he notice the icebergs, didn’t he pick up the paint brush, around the same time that vaccines were being rolled out and lockdowns were easing? He nods and starts talking about painterly skill, the materiality of paint, the story (apocryphal) of Van Gogh eating his paints. He is, patently, obsessed with painting.
Landscape painting has long been at the heart of Canadian art. Coupland has repeatedly referenced the Group of Seven, an influential collective of Canadian landscape painters in the early 20th century, and particularly Lawren Harris, as inspiration for the iceberg paintings. So for all of this breaking with a personal and aesthetic past, Coupland’s post-pandemic approach can also be traced to deep art historical roots.
Painting seems to represent something almost primal to him, an elemental form of expression that helps make sense of a turbulent world. He is now developing new work that returns to the medium’s own essential foundations: life painting. “I went to art school back when they taught drawing as a necessary skill. So I've been having models posing up in my studio, and it’s been wonderful. I’ve been doing body forms with no ulterior motives. Very small, very intimate forms. It’s about as old school as it gets.”
Eddy Frankel is a London-based art critic. His writing has been published by The Guardian, ArtReview, The Art Newspaper and Vanity Fair, among others. He is the founder of OOF, a magazine and gallery dedicated to art and football.