For artist David Popa, the Earth isn’t just inspiration — it’s the canvas itself. His murals have stretched across sandbanks in Norway, hardened lava fields in Iceland and jutting rock in Finland. Each piece exists only briefly before the landscape reclaims it. That tension — the beauty and the inevitability of loss — is core to his work.
His newest series, RENEWAL, took him to Alberta, Canada, where he created three monumental portraits on frozen and snow-covered terrain. The project, done in collaboration with Travel Alberta, followed nearly two weeks of exploring the province’s winter landscapes, from the glassy expanse of Abraham Lake to the dramatic walls of Cline River Canyon.
“My time in Alberta was unbelievable,” Popa said. “We really left no stone unturned to be able to go onto Abraham Lake, which is just one of the most beautiful canvases I’ve experienced—especially for my work on the ice. It gave us absolutely everything, from deep cold temperatures to really warm cracking ice, beautiful deep turquoise, the bubbles were amazing to even the windswept snow.”
The paintings — each stretching between 75 and 135 feet long — depict fragments of serene faces with closed eyes, as if savoring a long, restorative inhale. Popa created them by hand, using charcoal in a spraying device to coat ice and snow with subtle depth. The technique allows the portraits to emerge from the surface but still feel woven into the landscape.
Working outside always means battling the elements, and Alberta didn’t hold back. Subzero cold, fierce winds and shifting ice conditions shaped every step of the process. But for Popa, the challenges only sharpened the final result.
“Overall, it was an absolutely incredible experience,” he said. “I feel like I’m going to need weeks—maybe months—to process what happened. I created everything I could have imagined in one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, with some of the most beautiful people. It felt like every time we pushed the envelope, a weather window opened. It honestly felt miraculous.”
Like all of Popa’s land murals, the pieces are temporary. The portraits will fade with the sun, snow, wind and melting ice, leaving behind only photographs and video. That ephemerality is part of the point — the art exists in full only for those who encounter it in the moment.
But for Popa, that fleeting quality doesn’t diminish the work. It heightens it.
He calls the Earth the “ultimate canvas,” a collaborator that shapes, distorts, and eventually erases the art. And in Alberta’s deep turquoise ice, windswept snow and frozen bubbles, he found a canvas as alive and expressive as the faces he painted on it.
