Endeavours that are years-in-the-making, these projects see Cory head into wild places to create paintings dedicated to sharing the wonder of the natural world. To share the experiences further, Cory also use the mediums of film, photography, video journals and the written word.
In 2006, Cory Trépanier set off on a decade-long quest to paint, film, and explore the spectacular landscapes of the Canadian Arctic. With packs full of painting, filming, and camping gear, Trépanier undertook 5 expeditions, traversed over 60,000 kilometres, explored 6 Arctic National Parks and 16 Arctic communities, and countless places in between. He travelled by plane, helicopter, ship, boat, canoe, and on foot, often with the Inuit, stripping back day-to-day accoutrements to the basics of hiking boots, food, and a tent, in order to immerse himself in his subject.
The INTO THE ARCTIC collection now includes over 100 oil paintings and graphite sketches and 3 documentary films.
Through the INTO THE ARCTIC art, films, media stories, online content and public speaking, Trépanier is inspiring others with the beauty of the Canadian Arctic, raising awareness about one of the most fragile regions of our planet.
While researching possible painting locations for his Into the Arctic project, Trépanier came across numerous National Parks that held untamed beauty to paint, but were located south of the Arctic Circle.
In 2013, he focused his attention on one of these, Kluane National Park and Reserve. Located in the Southwest corner of the Yukon, it borders British Columbia and Alaska, and features the largest mountain massif on earth, and Canada’s highest peak: Mount Logan.
For a month, Trépanier skied on the largest non-polar ice field in the world and hiked the arduous Donjek Route, at one point descending a steep scree slope for a kilometre with his ninety-pound pack. He canoed the remote Mush and Bates Lakes and completed his expedition with a week-long trip by raft down the Alsek River to the glacier-strewn Lowell Lake. The first northern lights of the waning summer greeted him, as did the heart-pounding experience of witnessing a massive iceberg collapsing before his eyes as he sought to paint it.
In September of 2001, Trépanier launched Coast To Canvas with his wife Janet and their two young daughters, Andie and Sydney — then five and two and a half years old. Trépanier painted, filmed, canoed, hiked and camped for almost a month in each season along the coasts of Ontario’s Lake Superior and Georgian Bay, a region then designated as the Heritage Coast. This led to the Coast To Canvas Exhibition Tour in 2004 consisting of over 30 oil paintings and a one-hour documentary called A Painter’s Odyssey, Cory and Janet’s first film.
