Sunset Screening, English Bay

About the Work

Sunset Screening, English Bay stages the gentlest kind of spectacle: an open-air broadcast at the water's edge, timed against the best show the city knows. On the right a great screen burns green with the evening match; on the left the sun slides molten into the bay, laying a path of fire across the water between anchored freighters. Silhouetted spectators settle along the grassy bank and benches — some facing the football, some the sunset, most trying to watch both — while a plaza mosaic patterned like a stitched ball curves through the foreground.

Pius makes the two light sources argue and then reconcile: emerald pitch-glow on one side, apricot dusk on the other, meeting in the violet middle of the sky. The painting suggests that in Vancouver, even a world championship must share the bill with the evening sky — and that nobody minds.

Process & Technique

The piece is acrylic on coarse canvas, its sky pulled in long horizontal knife-drags that shade from tangerine through rose to deep violet. Spectators are reduced to dark, eloquent silhouettes laid over the glow, and the screen's green is deliberately the only cool saturated note, so the eye volleys between match and sunset just as the crowd does.