Tim Fraser’s paintings often reveal themselves slowly. At first, we may see little more than sweeping curves, flattened shapes and saturated colour. A tree becomes an enormous rounded form, a path a band of colour cutting through the canvas. Then, almost suddenly, the landscape appears.

Fraser has returned to Vancouver’s Stanley Park seawall as a subject for years, reducing its familiar trees, paths, water and sky to surprisingly simple forms. He gives us just enough information to recognize what we are looking at, leaving our minds to fill in the rest. And once we see the landscape, it becomes almost impossible not to see it.

That shift is at the heart of Fraser’s work. We tend to think that seeing is simply a matter of looking, but what we see is also shaped by what we already know. An abstract shape becomes a tree. A band of colour becomes a path. Nothing in the painting has changed, yet what we see has. Fraser’s paintings play with that wonderfully human instinct to make the unfamiliar familiar.