Canadian painter Sky Glabush makes landscapes that are as much built as painted. Working in oil mixed with sand, crushed quartz and raw pigment, he produces large, atmospheric canvases in which the surface itself carries the weight of the terrain they depict. The grit in the paint gives his skies and fields a physical presence, a roughness that photographs poorly and rewards standing in front of the work.

Glabush was born on the coast of British Columbia and is now based in rural Ontario, and the landscapes of both places feed his work. His paintings are not topographical records but moods: vast skies, low horizons and expanses of land rendered in muted, weathered tones. One recent work, The tipped cup of the moon (2026), measures 213 by 274 centimetres, a scale that turns a landscape into something closer to an environment. The title suggests a poetic rather than literal relationship to place, the moon as a cup, tipped and spilling light across the land.

A solo exhibition, If the Wild Bird Could Speak, opens at Alison Jacques in London on 20 November 2026 and runs until 9 January 2027. It is the latest in a run of shows that has brought Glabush's work to a wider audience, as collectors and curators have warmed to painting that is unapologetically concerned with landscape and place.

Glabush's approach sits within a broader revival of landscape painting, in which artists are returning to the genre with new materials and new anxieties about the natural world. His use of sand and quartz is more than a technique: it is a way of putting the landscape itself into the painting, grain by grain. For a painter working at this scale, the choice of ground matters: a canvas more than two metres wide demands a body in front of it, not just a pair of eyes.