$6,000

In 2005, Dorland painted The Loner, a self-portrait and a proverbial Adam in terms of the trajectory of his work. Though he’d been painting for several years, he called it his “first one.” Reflection, painted soon after, shows loner’s refinement. The figure is still naïvely painted compared with the signature style he’d go on to develop, but the landscape is already more gestural and more wryly Canadian. Bullrushes are so “Canadiana rustic.” Looking at this painting will feel, for those who know Dorland’s work, like hearing a favourite song from one’s youth. It floods you with a sense of who you used to be. In his early work, Dorland, now 52, worked out the difficult elements of his own biography but he also painted the lonely misfit in all of us, regardless of our age. It’s hard to say who articulated the feeling better – Dorland, when he painted loners in hoodies, or the poet Allen Ginsberg when he described “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.[i]”

[i] Howl, by Allen Ginsberg, 1954