Painter Wanda Koop shows us what we missed the first time, what remains hidden, and makes us question how and what we see. “I paint it and then I see it.”

The visionary Canadian artist Wanda Koop is preparing massive new paintings of archetypal cities and familiar yet disquieting landscapes. Named by Time Magazine as one of Canada’s best artists, recipient of the Order of Canada, honorary doctorates and prizes, Koop’s creative life is hectic. Taking a break from studio demands, she embarks on a journey by freighter boat. Sketches, photographs and moments of observation soon lead to a new group of astonishing paintings.

The film explores the science of vision, colour, perception and creative thinking. This is an experience-based film that explores the importance of the artist’s studio, as a factory of the imagination.

A sketching trip by freighter boat, paintings, colour and vision experiments accompanied by interviews and an evocative music score reveal her creative process from the real to the imagined. We enter Koop’s world. We start to find our way when we relate Koop’s strange yet familiar images to our own frames of reference.

“I cannot have any distraction whatsoever… It’s like being a tight ropewalker. If I get one distraction I will fall off… I have to trust all of that. if I stop trusting the process then I would stop making art. “