STEFAN BERG'S 'LITTLE THINGS' CELEBRATES BEAUTY IN UNEXPECTED PLACES
Interview by Rebeccah Love
Stefan Berg is a painter and printmaker known for his urban landscapes of Toronto. His work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States and Europe, and featured in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and the Telegram Journal. In 2024, Berg was awarded a Chalmers Fellowship. His work belongs to the collection of the City of Toronto.
Berg brings a contemporary lens to the traditional practice of plein air painting. His works emphasize the human imprint on the landscape, drawing our attention to the intersections of architecture, infrastructure, and nature. Berg’s paintings offer a meditation on place, perception, and time, transforming the seemingly incidental into something profound. Through his rigorous yet intuitive approach, he reminds us that the built environment is not static—it is a living record of human presence, change, and memory.
You have spoken before about the urgency and immediacy of plein air painting. For the works that are completed in the studio, how do you translate the experience of plein air to your indoor workspace?
This is one of the greatest challenges. With the works of Tom Thomson or James Wilson Morrice, the sketches are more emotive, more immediate than the studio works. However, working in the studio offers a completely different approach to painting, one that is more contemplative, which can be a good thing and a bad thing. In the studio the tendency is to pre-plan and sometimes over think and therefore overwork. When you’re outside you have limitations presented by the circumstances, so I try to bring those limitations into the studio by using time constraints. But the two methods have different purposes. The studio works offer the larger scale, an opportunity for invention, the refinement of a composition, the distillation of elements towards an abstract goal.
Can you talk about the specific architectural landmarks you have chosen to paint for this exhibition? What drew you to each?
I pass by The Don Jail frequently. I have considered painting it in different seasons, from different angles. I like this particular vantage point of the building emerging from behind the hillside, set within Riverdale Park. It’s always a challenge to add a figure in a landscape, the figure tends to overwhelm a picture, they instantly imply narrative. In this case I subdued the figure, working within a close value range. The building is somewhat sinister, and the relationship between the figure and the dog is ambiguous, they add to the tension of the sense.
The City Adult Learning Centre is a building I have painted many times, almost in a celebratory way. It’s a 60s building which was a great period in architecture. Our examples in Toronto tend to be civic buildings; public schools, post offices, LCBOs, Hydro buildings. This one is a public school. Peter Pennington, the design architect of this building, did a number of public schools in Toronto. Unfortunately, these buildings have been significantly neglected. The nice thing about this period was that the budgets were pretty decent and materials were of high-quality. It’s nice to remember that there was a time when Toronto had some architectural ambition, and these buildings really set a standard, one I don’t think has been upheld. I began this painting on site, it took two sessions just to get the drawings right. I thought it was rather fitting that the painting looks like an architectural rendering.
The Ontario Science Centre was designed by Raymond Moriyama. This is the second Moriyama building I’ve painted. In 2023 I painted the interior of the Toronto Reference Library. This particular view of the Science Centre might be less common to visitors, it's seen from the back of the building, set within a wetland which you have to access through a forest. I was really intrigued by how the building rose up out of the landscape, how the verticality of the building is amplified by how low I have situated myself.
And the small piece, this drew a lot of attention at your opening. Can you talk about your experience creating this one?
Yes, the little painting of the National Ballet School, that’s based on a memory from many years ago. Something I saw very briefly but that stayed with me. I often see things I know I want to paint but it can take a few years before I actually paint them, in the meantime the ideas hover in the mind, percolate. I like the concept of this building, with the dance studio visible from the street the rehearsal becomes a performance in a sense. I'm fascinated with the space that can be obtained within a small painting, almost like you're peering through a window into another universe. I’m intrigued with the idea that a small painting can contain an enormous space. When I make a decision regarding scale, it has to do with how the scale relates to the experience. What it feels like to be there. When I experienced this scene I immediately thought of Seurat’s painting Sideshow.
Can you share a bit about The Main Square. This is a subject you have returned to a number of times. I see this painting has a long creation period.
My former studio was on Dawes Road and over the course of about a decade I painted this view of the main square towers approximately 20 times. I was interested in the relationship between the buildings, and seeing them under various weather and light conditions. This particular piece I began in 2017. It was exhibited in 2019 in my first exhibition with United Contemporary. It came back to me about a year ago and I hung it in my living room. Looking at it again I started to remember things about the scene I had left out, or hadn’t thought necessary at the time to put in. I thought reworking it from memory years later would be an interesting way back into that time in my life, and it was ever nostalgic. I made adjustments to the composition in general, but the most noticeable change was adding the alleyway in the floor ground.
One of your canvases captures the majestic light of a car dealership at night. This is a different type of building from the rest of the architecture you have focused on, a recent building, a commercial building. What was the greatest challenge in bringing this image to life?
The title “Hard Time Parking At Magic Tina’s” comes from a dream my partner had. She is an excellent songwriter and I think it’s charming that she came up with this absurd title in her sleep. I like that the title is nonsensical precisely because I did not want to be too literal with my depiction of the actual car dealership, use its name or paint its signage. I was interested in the light effects of the building, the reflection in the river, the illuminated graffiti along the horizon; the dreamy atmosphere of the scene.
This was a scene I came across while working on another painting. During the Pandemic I painted the former Unilever plant on the Don River. The building has since been demolished. At the end of those painting sessions, I would walk home and pass by this scene. It’s common that one painting will lead to another like this. When I saw the scene, I immediately associated it with a nocturne by Michael Andrews. It’s interesting, the association you make with an experience and another artist's work doesn’t always make its way back to the studio. But it does help to ignite an idea. I often see the landscape through an art historical lens like this. A number of paintings in my exhibition quite intentionally refer back to Canadian painters; the figure in The Don Jail I associate with Alex Coville. The foreground in Magic Tina points to Lauren Harris. The Viaduct has a bit of Jack Chambers in it.
In a recent interview with Border Crossings, Sky Glabush talked about his early paintings of the London Ontario post war homes. He refers to the process of painting these works as being “stillborn” because he was working from a photograph in a faithful manner, there wasn’t enough space or freedom for the images to evolve. I avoid working from photography for this reason. I want the image to grow out of the making. That being said, those paintings are among my favourite things he’s made. I don’t think it really matters how a painting comes about, whether it’s painted from life, or a photo, or one’s mind or memory, as long as it serves the artist well. The challenge with Magic Tina was to get the elements to feel right without having a lot to refer to. I revisited the scene a number of times while I was working on the painting in the studio, as I often do. And I created an ink wash as a study, this is something I am doing more frequently now. I find the medium asks me to invent more, to simplify or abstract from the facts.
For me there seems to be a homage to William Kurelek in your painting of the view from the Viaduct. Were you aware of his depiction of the Don Valley from the Viaduct?
I do like his painting of the Don Valley. I often see it when I visit the AGO. I like seeing what has changed in the landscape. The act of painting one’s surroundings always becomes a document of a time and place. The City Adult Learning Centre and The Don Jail are depicted in his painting. I have painted a number of views from the viaduct, both north and south facing. I would say these works are more influenced by the experience of travelling on the subway, seeing this vast view of the city in different seasons, and in motion. The challenge has always been to knit together multiple perspectives in order to obtain the full panoramic view. The geography has to be interpreted, altered, reinvented if it is going to be contained in this sense.
The Painting, Kingston Road (Piero's Legend), has a noticeably thicker, more textured application of paint. Can you share more about your process making this painting and your thoughts on including it in this show?
This is a composition I have explored several times, a view of distant buildings from the ravine behind my parents home overlooking the rooftops of their neighbours. For me this image resembles a passage from Piero Della Francesca‘s Legend of the True Cross, a cubist-like depiction of his hometown of Arezzo which appears in the top left of one of the frescoes. The fresco has deteriorated and so the representation has been obscured.
I included this work in my exhibition because it offers a glimpse of the style I am developing currently in the studio. The surface is developed through many sessions of trial and error. The final surface sits upon 20 or 30 previous attempts. The accretion of paint, and the pentimenti of layers beneath has obscured the depiction. I am letting go of the representation, letting it fall away into the paint itself. The texture allows the colours to mingle in a different way. Edges soften, forms merge into one another.
I have recently moved my studio to 401 Richmond. The nature of being downtown, the surrounding buildings and the views from 401 itself are bound to enter into my new work.
The backroom at United Contemporary features two large pastoral paintings, marking a shift in subject matter. Are you interested in continuing this?
I have always painted in the fields around my family cottage. In fact, this is where I began painting plein air approximately 20 years ago. However, this is the first time I’ve created large works of this subject matter. They are intended for a duo show with Chuck Beamish, at United Contemporary, in November 2025. For this exhibition I will also be exploring the waterfront of Lake Huron.
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