On July 9, 2010, a couple of movie stunt technicians strapped me into the back of a pick-up truck along with a painting easel. They proceeded to drive the truck and me from the Abotsford to New Westminister, British Columbia; a 40 km (25 mile) trip.

We followed the original route of the Cariboo-Yale Wagon Road, which was first created in 1861. For over a hundred years this now mostly forgotten stretch of road was the most important east-west overland route in British Columbia. Years later, it became the Grand Truck Road (1890's), the Trans-Canada Highway (1941) and since the 1960's has been known as the Fraser Highway. Originally created to allow access to the Fraser Valley gold fields in the winter once the Fraser River had frozer over and steamships were unable to make the journey, it later became the main highway connecting Vancouver to the rest of Canada.

The finished paintings and video were on view at the Surrey Art Gallery in Surrer, B.C. from July 3-September 12, 2010.

(Video camera: Vince Laxton and Alexander Arsenault. Still Photography by Dennis Ha)

Some thoughts about the project:

Though I had wanted to make a painting while standing in the back of a moving pick-up truck for many years, it wasn't until this opportunity to exhibit at the Surrey Art Gallery came along that I could find a strong enough reason to do it. There seemed to me to be some poetic link between riding a wagon and a pick-up truck; while one was once quite literally pulled by horses, the other is 'horse-powered' and often pulls trailers with loaded with horses. The primary function of both vehicles is to haul heavy materials, and therefore are engineered to endure a great deal of wear and tear.

Though I was wearing a mountain climbing harness that was safely secured to the truck with a myriad of ropes tied securely by movie-stunt technicians, I wanted to at least simulate some of the danger and excitement that a person traveling the Yale Road would have experienced so many years ago. It was important to me to have my body exposed to the elements: to have the wind and the rain pound upon me as I worked on my painting, just as a wagon rider would have shivered under a Hudson's Bay blanket as it meandered along the Yale Road in the typically unseasonably cold British Columbia weather. Mother nature was true to form on the day I enacted my performance, unleashing a terrible rain storm upon me as I struggled to paint in the moving vehicle.

I often think of one of my drawings or paintings as a compressed 'core-sample' of a journey, in that each mark or brushtroke corresponds to a specific time and place along the route. The finished artwork therefore contains the entire journey on a flat surface, and can be perceived spontaneously all at once.

By putting myself in such an intense situation where I have absolutely no time to stop to consider the information that is streaming into my eyes and other senses, I fall into a 'zen-like' state and I become totally inside the present moment. It is quite a strange sensation, almost animalistic really. I become both terribly excited and extremely relaxed. Perhaps one could call it a 'sublime' experience, because my measly brain is incapable of fully grasping what is essentially a horrifically beautiful situation: surely the human body was never intended to experience riding 'in' a truck, but standing 'on' the back of it erases any illusion of normalcy and separateness that the windshield seems to suggest.

Of course this is made all the more absurd by my Quixotic attempt to represent the experience with a paintbrush and easel while actually undergoing the experience. If anything, my struggle to represent actually prevents my mind from considering the experience as it unfolds; there simply isn't the time to think about anything, I can only 'do.'

In this way I can sometimes feel as though I am time-travelling, or that my process acts as a time-travelling device, and perhaps this is another reason why I feel a need to document the process. It is as though I am traveling faster than the speed of thought, or of my own thoughts at least! My body moves a step ahead of my brain. Perhaps this is what athletes mean when they talk about time 'slowing down' at moments of intense concentration.

What is the difference between painting from the back of a truck and driving a stagecoach? The horses who pull the wagon have been replaced by a massive engine, and rather than lashing at them with a whip and reigns, I lord over the engine with my easel and brush. I have determined the route of the vehicle, and the driver of the truck is merely executing my wishes; he is like the brain of the horse. I am the driver. I drive the truck with my brush. By pushing the paint onto the surface of the canvas, I am urging the vehicle forward, pushing it, willing it. If I stop painting, the vehicle stops, just as if the driver of the wagon falls asleep, the horses will come to a stop and simply munch on the grass on the side of the path.

Just as the gold miner travels back from Yale with his winnings or losses, I too travel west and arrive at the bank of the Fraser River with my painting. Do arrive having achieved 'success' or has my experience been a 'failure'? Have I struck gold, or have I lost everything and made a fool out of myself. The stakes are incredibly high. I have a crew of ten people who have devoted their day to helping me document this experience. Have I let them all down? Do they all wonder 'what for?' The pressure to create something that is indisputably 'art' is immense.