The Cup on the Horizon

About the Work

The Cup on the Horizon is the most visionary painting of the Vancouver suite. On a rocky, driftwood-strewn shore framed by windswept pines, two small figures scramble up the stones waving the maple leaf and a club flag, hailing an apparition across the water: the championship cup itself, vast and golden, hovering above the strait like a risen sun. To the left the towers of Vancouver glitter along the horizon; to the right a timber lodge shelters among the evergreens; gulls scatter through a sky of rolling silver cloud.

Pius paints anticipation as a kind of weather. The trophy on the horizon is not literal — it is the summer everyone can feel coming, rendered the way coastal people have always read their future: by looking out to sea. Wilderness, city and dream share one canvas, which is perhaps the most Vancouver idea of all.

Process & Technique

Acrylic on textured board, the shoreline is knifed in heavy, gritty impasto — actual ridges of paint standing in for barnacled rock — while the sea is layered in cool, translucent drags of blue-grey. The trophy is glazed in successive golds over a pale ground so it glows with its own light rather than sitting on the sky.