Artist pays spectacular tribute to Canada’s protected parks

A particularly chilling episode at Algonquin Park in Ontario spawned graphic artist Cameron Stevens’s tendency to include nature in his art. A tornado was a couple hundred yards away from him while he stood with nothing but a canoe, tent, and backpack to his name.

“The experience spurred my creativity,” he recalls. “I needed to remember that day, something physical, something to remind me that there are wild places out there waiting to be experienced.”

Since then, the graphic artist has visited several national parks, which he photographed on each trip, highlighting the unique scenery each park had to offer.

When visiting major national parks in the US, Stevens got his hands on some reproductions of screen-printed posters originally produced in the ’30s and ’40s as promotional material.

Stevens was struck by the simplistic beauty of the prints, and he decided to recreate the look using Canada’s beautiful protected parks as subjects and his original photographs for the images.

The results are an attractive rendering of old-fashioned prints, with a kind of stark use of a limited colour palette that gives them a nuanced, antiquated look. He also writes taglines for the prints, resembling advertisements, and includes a list of the standout features of each park.

As of now, Stevens has produced five posters for the national parks he’s visited frequently (see the gallery below). His goal is to complete a poster for a major park in each province and then delve into any number of the hundreds of remaining parks across Canada.

For more information about Stevens’ work or to purchase prints, visit cameronstevens.ca

The-Massasauga

Moraine-Lake

Fathom-Five

Killarney-Park

By Brenlee Coates