Alex Cameron’s opulent landscape Magenta Green Hills (2005), reproduced here, is so vibrantly alive and pictorially cheeky - so youthful, in other words - it’s not easy to adjust oneself to the realization that another of the paintings in his exhibition, Alex Cameron: An Artist’s Pick, currently at the Moore Gallery, was made as long ago as 1972.

“When did you begin to paint seriously?” I ask him. I’m talking to him on the phone in the evening during one of the all-night sessions Cameron often spends in his studio.

“In 1969, I think it was,” he says.

“And so this new exhibition is a kind of retrospective?” I ask him.

“Yeah, I guess so,” he says, “but I call it An Artist’s Pick because the word ‘retrospective’ makes it sound as if they’re building your wooden box in the next room.”

Cameron had scarcely begun painting when he found himself working as studio assistant for the late Jack Bush, one of Canada’s finest colour-field abstract painters. “I worked for Jack basically for the last five years of his life,” Cameron tells me, “until his death in 1977.”

“Did you learn anything?” I ask him.

“Well,” he says, “I certainly know how to pour a double Beefeater on the rocks with a twist!”

“I guess that’s a marketable skill?” I venture.

“Sure,” Cameron replies.

Given the hectic beauty of the works in the exhibition, I figure he must have learned more than that, though. Or, more likely, he simply discovered it all for himself. One of the pleasures afforded by his rather ad-hoc survey, in fact, is the tracing of the trajectory Cameron has followed in passing from the making of merely pleasing but rather conventionally organized abstract paintings in the early eighties to the increasingly voluptuous paintings he makes now, some of which are non-representational paintings, and some of which are landscapes- such as the convulsively beautiful Magenta Green Hills.

Nobody uses colour the way Cameron does.

“You’re sort of a modern-day fauve, aren’t you?” I venture (I’m thinking about the Matisse and Derain of about 1905, and about all those yellow skies and red trees and purple lakes).

“I love those guys!” he says.

“But where does all of this fantastically rich colour of yours actually come from?” I ask him.

“From migraines,” he says.

It turns out Cameron has suffered from crippling migraines for most of his life. “I’d close my eyes and the world would explode with colour,” he says. “And I figured, well, I may as well get some use out of it.”

And so he does- big-time. The far hills of Magenta Green Hills really are a hot magenta, and the sky is warm with buttery gold, and the water-sports whitecaps are every colour but white. And, speaking of white, three of the trees in the foreground are as white as bone.

“Why white?” I ask Cameron.

“Because,” he explains carefully to me, “they’re dead.”

Oh yeah, right. “So do you paint out in the wilderness, en plain air, as it were, or do you paint these landscapes in the studio?”

“Both,” he tells me. “I travel out into the landscape - Magenta Green Hills, for example, was painted in Newfoundland, about five kilometres away from Trepassy. Well, actually, I painted a series of small watercolours of the place while I was there,” he says, “and then worked up the final painting in my studio back in Toronto.”

“Do you ever work from photographs?” I ask him.

“Photographs give you too much information,” he says. And Cameron doesn’t want too much information. It gets in the way of imagination, passion and joy - everything that powers his thunderous painting.