Stripping the landscape to its essential forms is what Barry Hodgson does best. And in so doing, he bares the soul of the land.

Hodgson, one of Hamilton's leading landscape painters, enjoyed a change of scenery last year, when he was artist-in-residence at Gros Morne National Park on the west coast of Newfoundland.

The park's craggy coast and mountains inspired the 20 or so paintings, mostly watercolour and ink, on show at Gallery on the Bay.

Hodgson, whose work appears in many public and private collections in Canada, has been exhibiting for almost 30 years.

He paints in an expressive and starkly simplified style that strikes an uneasy balance between representation and abstraction.

Some of the work was painted on location, others completed in his studio.

In Below the Tablelands I (2006), a watercolour view of a rocky shore under a blue-grey sky, Hodgson tips the scales in favour of the abstract. He reduces the rocks in the foreground to a series of irregular shapes, outlined in thick black and filled with oranges and browns.

The black lines help to draw attention to the basic shapes of the rocks. The paint within each shape is applied in such a way that the marks and directions of the brush are obvious. And Hodgson leaves bits of the white paper bare, reminding us that this is indeed a painting and not a faithful reproduction of a specific view.

Dramatic dark cliffs dominate Low Cloud, Western Brook Pond II (2007), another watercolour. Hodgson turns the cliffs into bold verticals growing out of a horizontal grey strip smeared across the bottom.

Terracotta and white lines enliven and cut into the dark shapes. The left side rises higher, while the right dissolves into cloud and mist, captured through soft smudges of colour. These contrast with the more vigorously applied solid forms in the rest of the painting.

The sky takes over in Tablelands and Cloud II (2007), a highly animated oil. Hodgson places the viewer high up in the mountains. The reddish tops of one rugged range lie at the bottom of the composition under a sky built up with layers of blue paint.

The artist-in-residence program that welcomed Hodgson to Gros Morne National Park is a joint project of Parks Canada, the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Hodgson's exhibition runs until May 20. It's followed by Paintings of Japan by Victor Cinti, which opens on Friday, May 25, with a reception starting at 7 p.m.

Showtime

Who: Barry Hodgson

What: Paintings of Newfoundland

Where: Gallery on the Bay, 231 Bay St. N.

When: Until May 20

Hours: Noon to 5 p.m., Thursday through Sunday

Phone: 905-540-8532

Regina Haggo, a former professor of art history at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@thespec.com