Gordon Rice

Through all this time, Gordon Rice has made and continues to make work in these formats: large oil paintings (one of which is in the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery[10] and another in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art[11]), large scale collages, many incorporating photographs; and small or very small collages on paper, watercolours,[12] and drawings.

[13] Many of these works are in private collections; one piece on public view is the large oil Corner Still Life in the collection of Fairmont Hotels, hanging in the lobby of the Fairmont Chateau Whistler in Whistler, BC[14] Rice's work reveals his interest in classical drawing and painting, but also in abstraction and media/surface play, with Asian influences and allusions.

Many diverse themes can be found[15] in Rice's work: observation of suburban life; significant themes emerging from mundane materials and subjects; Asian and Pacific Rim influences on North American culture; cluttered interiors and still lifes; human figures in everyday settings (including portraits of his wife Ester); gardens and plants, art films, movies, music, astronomy, literary or philosophical texts, cars and industrial sites/equipment; themes common to the hipster movement of the 1950s and 1960s such as Buddhism, Americana and Canadiana; abstract visual relationships, especially those generated by camera optics or distortions of light and reflections; children's art (including collaged elements from his own daughters and grandchildren); advertising, kitsch, and even camp, especially in elements (labels, advertisements, etc.)

The interest in photography pre-dates the rise of the Vancouver School of Photoconceptualism, which Rice took notice of without entering into a particular dialogue with it in his work.

Commenting on a tendency to remain aloof from art world trends, Curator and first director of the Charles H. Scott Gallery Archived 2011-10-15 at the Wayback Machine, Ted Lindberg was already writing in 1974 that "Rice has brought ... to Nakusp fragments of ... the peculiarly Pacific world...," and that "he has an almost panoramic knowledge of the interactions and/or disparities between western European art and several hundred other cultures and subcultures....