Taking The Scenic Route With Stefan Berg

Stefan Berg, Bloor Viaduct Looking South, 2024. Oil on canvas. 20 x 36 inches. Courtesy of United Contemporary.

When I was young, the Don Vallery Parkway represented a kind of portal. Growing up in Scarborough, it was the path to the excitement of “downtown” for me – to the concert venues, theatres, art galleries and museums I spent plenty of time in. These days I rarely take its snaking route anywhere, but when I occasionally cross the Bloor Viaduct by subway, I still look upon the DVP with a feeling of deep sentimentality.

Toronto-based plein air painter Stefan Berg has captured expansive scenes of the humble roadway over the course of his artistic career, as well as other more notable and equally nostalgic locations like the Toronto Reference Library and more recently, The Ontario Science Centre. This newer work, spurred on by Berg’s interest in the architecture of Raymond Moriyama – the architect responsible for both of those iconic local designs – is part of the painter’s new show on at United Contemporary, Little Things.

The exhibition beautifully exemplifies Berg’s considered versatility in style and perspective; some pieces, like that of the Science Centre, are grand and reverential. Others, like my favourite in the show – a miniscule glimpse at ballet dancers practicing through the windows of The National Ballet School on Jarvis Street – asks viewers to peer closer and take stock of the beautiful and heartstring-tugging details that can easily be missed in a city as fast-changing at this. And one, Kingston Road (Piero’s Legend), is distinctly different from rest; layered paint textures add an enticing abstract element against Berg’s otherwise crisp renderings.

I had the chance to visit Stefan in the weeks leading up to his show, where I asked him about painting en plein air, the progression of his subject matter and technique, and what it’s like to document Toronto at such a pivotal time.

Stefan Berg, The Main Square (#11), 2017-2025. Oil on canvas. 50 × 60 inches. Courtesy of United Contemporary.

When did you decide that plein air was going to be the focus of your practice? And what’s it like painting en plein air in Toronto – do you go out all year?

I started painting en plein air with my father when I was pretty young. We were painting outside of the city, where our cottage is. At that time, I was mostly inspired by artists like John Constable.

I do go out in all seasons and all kinds of weather. It keeps it interesting, and each session has a challenge of its own. In Winter, you obviously have to have the right equipment and prepare yourself for the temperature; and the window of opportunity is much shorter too, so you have to work fast and know what you're doing. In Summer, it can be overwhelmingly hot if you don't find a good spot. Given that you have to be prepared in all these ways, it makes the act of going out and painting a bit like a sport. I like that element of it – that it becomes a combination of activity and art.

And how has your practice evolved over the years?

I’ve always been an observational painter; painting from life and putting myself in a different environment. When you paint en plein air, you’re not in an environment that has a lot of control, so there are challenges that come along with going outside to work. But I've always worked from life, and did a lot of portraits from models that would sit for me – people like my friends and family, and I also did interiors.

I had a studio on Dawes Road for ten years, and I painted a lot of pictures from the rooftop or from the windows of this building, as well as the interior and lots of figurative stuff there. The landscape was more of an industrial subject matter, because the building was situated by old factories and a lumber mill.

I was interested in painting whatever was around me back then, but I didn't really pick up the practice of going out on my bike or walking around within the Don Valley or Taylor Creek until that studio was slated for development, and I moved away from that area. I found myself back in the Don Valley area where I grew up, and reconnecting with landscapes that I had interacted with in my youth. Something just clicked and felt like, oh, this seems right.

Stefan Berg, The Ontario Science Centre, 2024-2025. Oil on canvas. 43 × 41 inches. Courtesy of United Contemporary.

This new show, Little Things, has a piece that you painted from that building. Tell me more about it.

That work, The Main Square, was exhibited previously in my first show with United Contemporary in 2019. After the show it went into storage, and then I came across it about a year ago. I thought I could rework it and continue it, because there was a portion of the of the view that I could reveal. I did so, and I did it from memory,

After having moved away from that location about five years ago, it was a nice way to revisit that time in my life, and that painting is quite personal and sentimental – although I don't think too many people find beauty in those types of towers [laughs]. But it was a fun way to play with a subject and continue something that I had put down for a while.

You mentioned sentimentality, and that’s something that I feel very strongly when looking at your work too. But what’s interesting is that you can capture really personally intimate moments of nostalgia, and larger ones like in the case of The Science Centre. How do these moments relate?

It’s interesting, because more people would have interacted with The Science Centre, so I did clue in to that idea of it having a wider draw. That piece came about because I has just worked on a painting of the Reference Library, which was done by the same architect, Raymond Moriyama – and I find that that building quite incredible. I thought that it was worth taking my bike on the Don Valley and going and seeing The Science Centre, exploring it from all different angles, and then trying to find a vantage point that would be worth painting.

I was aware of the fact that at that time, there was talk of it closing. But this work wasn’t intended to make a particular statement about that; it was more like, it’s a shame that they would tear this down, and I want to do something with it.

Stefan Berg, Kingston Road (Piero’s Legend), 2012-2023. Oil on canvas. 16 × 20 inches. Courtesy of United Contemporary.

Are there other ways that the demolition of Toronto’s existing structures is informing your work?

Yeah, definitely. Some of it is more retrospective, like the former Lever Plant on the Don Valley Parkway and the Eastern portion of the Gardiner Expressway – those locations have been demolished over the last two summers. Those were things that I painted that seemed to really connect with people.

When those were all demolished, I thought about how interesting my practice has become in terms of having an element of documenting the city; these paintings now act as a record, essentially. In a way, that’s partly what I was thinking of while painting The Science Centre as well.

Going forward, there aren’t any buildings that are slated for demolition that I necessarily want to work from, but I am drawn to a lot of the construction sites in the city and potentially working from a location like a semi-demolished structure as a kind of starting point. From there, maybe letting it go in a direction that could be a bit more abstract, playing with the geometry of the steel structures that support the historical facades of a building that have to be kept on up. There are some really huge sites where the volume of space that's contained within these perimeter walls that are very intriguing to me. But that’s more of a building-in-transition kind of focus.

That’s appropriate given that Toronto feels like a city that is forever in transition.

Yeah, there’s so much going up or coming down, and I’m interested in both. Construction sites are interesting because they have things in them that almost look like ruins, and sometimes, you can see a sort of potential – like, oh, if they just kept it like that it would actually be a pretty good building. Of course, they finish it and it's awful, but there’s a pull in the architectural potential of a construction site. That’s sort of where I'd like to be going.

You mentioned abstraction earlier, and I wanted to ask you about the Kingston Road piece because it’s quite different from the rest of the work in Little Things. When I think of your paintings, everything is so crisp; one can tell right away what they’re looking at. But not with this piece.

That’s very much what I like about it, and this work represents the style that I'm referring to in terms of going forward, where there are representational elements and then that kind of fizzles out into the raw medium that it’s built from. The edges are softened, and things are blurring into one another and that's a result of the heavy texture of the painting, which was built through many trial and error sessions. There are a lot of dead paintings underneath it, and I was intrigued by developing the surface.

That crispness you’re referring to – the highly rendered sort of style – is something that I'd been developing particularly on site. When working on a plein air piece it's a little less common to achieve that degree of rendering, and the reason is because I often return to the subject for maybe two or three sessions as opposed to making a one-shot painting, which is really the common method for a plein air style.

Now, I'm very interested in going in that other direction. I worked for a while to develop one set of skills and feel like I achieved them, and now I want to see if I can do something else.

Stefan Berg, Cabin Interior, 2013-2025. Oil on canvas over board. 24 × 24 inches. Courtesy of United Contemporary.

You’ve mentioned revisiting and reworking, or building on, a couple of pieces in this show. Is this something that you do often in your practice?

It’s not very common in a commercial practice for someone to do that. It's not very lucrative, in a way, to make a painting and then continue it for 10 years or something. But I  have done it a lot over the years, and have work that’s had very long creation periods that are kind of broken up due to many things.

Another Main Square painting that I made – I made many – was one that I worked on during the Spring of one year and then put it down until the following Spring, and then picked it up and put it down and picked it up again the following Spring. It was about three Springs worth of painting but separated by the rest of the year where it wasn't worked on.

There's that idea where you're staying true to the season, and then I got in the habit of working over things. So, I would do something in the Spring, and then I'd see if I could use that for the ground for a painting that was done in the Fall, and then maybe that wouldn't work but then I'd take it out and work a winter scene on top of it. I would return to the same subject, but I would be starting with something already somewhat developed in terms of composition, and then you get these sort of weird blurring lines between the seasons.

Sometimes a painting is totally reworked, and sometimes it has elements of both old and new peeking through. There’s another work at United Contemporary in the gallery that’s not part of the exhibition of a cabinet in the back room of my cottage. It's a still life that I started it many years ago, and then essentially every Summer, I would continue on this painting. Eventually, I took it back to the city and started carrying it back and forth while working on it. Finally, it got to a point where I was really happy with it.

While it’s certainly not that common to carry on with a painting for so long, I think that gives the work a lived-in quality. I have so much time put into them and layered into them, and that is offered back to the viewer.

Stefan Berg, National Ballet School, 2024. Oil on canvas. 7 × 5 inches. Courtesy of United Contemporary.

One thing that stands out to me with the pieces in the show is that we've got scenes that are very sweeping, like a vista vibe, and and then pieces like the National Ballet work, where the viewer is getting a really focused and narrowed-in perspective. Why did you lean into that dichotomy?

Well first, the subject matter is what will always direct the orientation and the scale of the canvas. In this exhibition, people do have to stand back often to see the larger works and then come close to see the small ones. It creates an interesting viewing experience, especially when these different scales are staggered together on one wall, forcing people to almost weave back and forth. I'm very fascinated with the world that you can create with a painting, almost like you're peering through a porthole into this other universe in a small-scale work. And then there’s the challenge of trying to make a painting of a scene which contains an enormous amount of space, like a landscape.

Because of these variations, the works interact with our bodies in a different way – we are sort of consumed by them if they're big enough; they kind of wrap around our vision, and we can see side to side and up and down at the same time. It feels like we’re set within them, not as if we're peering into this other world. We're actually in that other world.

When I'm making the decision of scale, it really has to do with how that relates to the experience of being at that location. And because I am working from first-hand experience, I'm always thinking about how that feels and how to translate my own perceptual experience to the viewer so that the works can trigger some sort of embodiment for them.

Stefan Berg’s Little Things is on until March 22nd at United Contemporary.