One day in 1988, while painting near his home in France, Jean Claude Roy looked at the sun a moment too long. That moment changed his art and his career forever. 

“It was very hot,” he recalls. “I was painting a yellow field, a blue sky. No clouds at all.” After glancing at the sun, a dark spot appeared on the canvas. So, he painted what he saw, a black sun. His sight soon recovered, but this fluke, this trick of the eye, left him with a new emotional response to the landscape. Since then, in every one of his thousands of paintings, a sun appears in the sky. But not just any sun.

For three years, he played with the concept. Sometimes the sun was a dark, round hole in the sky, sometimes just a dot. Roy shows me one painting from 1990 that hangs at his home and studio in Portugal Cove-St. Philips, just outside St. John’s, N.L. Over a Newfoundland coastal scene with fishing shanties and a swirl of white seagulls, a black sun hangs, referencing the black eyes of codfish lying on a wharf in the foreground.

“You can imagine my feeling when the codfish come out of the water. The poor fish. Burned by the sun. The birds are there.” He describes the scene as a political painting. “That was the moment when the moratorium came in Newfoundland, the last time the wharf was full of fish.” Years later, he returned and discovered a different scene. Gone were the fish and with them, the shanties and wharf.

“After three years, I say, all right, I’m going to destroy the sun,” says Roy. “Break it in colours. Balance it with the land.” In every painting since, the sun appears, but it’s no longer black and never round. For the past 30 years or more, his irregular, often rectangular suns in shades of lemon, bronze, gold, scarlet, and snowy white hover over his landscapes like rents in the clouds, holes in his abstract skies, or patches on colourful quilts.

“He does these crazy suns in the heavens,” Ian Muncaster says. He’s the director of Zwicker’s Gallery in Halifax, which has sold Roy’s work for 15 years. “Just a splat in the sky as opposed to a circle. Maybe that’s how we all see it. We don’t see the sun as circular because we never look directly at it. It’s a sort of light in the heavens.” Always a presence, Roy’s suns seem to move like spirits in the air, sometimes hiding within some big Newfoundland weather-scape, always playing off the scene beneath rather than illuminating it.

Roy calls himself an expressionist colourist, but only because people ask him to identify his style. His fascination with colour began when he was a child. “We always wonder why we paint,” he says. “I think we are born like that. I wanted to be an artist at seven.” His grandfather, a farmer who valued art, encouraged Roy and bought him supplies. At the market, Roy collected the coloured paper packed around fruit and made art from it.

His father insisted he learn a trade, so he trained as an electrician. A friend who worked on tankers would send him postcards from his travels, and Roy got a job as an electrical engineer aboard a French ship that repaired transatlantic cables. Docked in St. John’s for months, Roy fell in love with Newfoundland. After completing compulsory military service back in France, he returned in 1971, married and immigrated to Newfoundland.

He spent the next 12 years rewiring motors for a local company. In his spare time, he painted enough to open his first exhibition in 1973. He sold every piece. Although Roy quickly made a name for himself in Canada, he returned to France in 1982 to build a reputation there. He bought his parents’ old stone farmhouse, painted, and taught art for 14 years. Since 1996, he’s split his time between the farmhouse and Portugal Cove-St. Philips.

Galleries in Newfoundland, the Maritimes, France, and the southern U.S. represent his work. And there is a lot of work. Roy says painting is his drug, and he completes a painting almost every day, almost always en plein air, carrying his canvas and supplies to the edge of a village or a cliff and painting what he sees. Working quickly, each time with a unique palette of colours to suit the setting, Roy fills the canvas using tools he has on hand. When he taught art, he’d tell his students to use whatever cheap brushes they could afford.

“If you’re a good artist, you can paint with a toothbrush,” he laughs. Once, on a long trip, he forgot his brushes, so he bought one meant for painting houses and added details with the end of a chewed stick. “The thing is creativity. In a painting, you should see the artist. In my paintings, I’m messy. I don’t like straight lines.” The lilt of his buildings, the tilt of their rooftops, his vibrant, sometimes brooding colours capture something of the Newfoundland spirit.

Roy says he regards each painting like a diary entry. 

“This is a moment in my life. I don’t paint because it’s beautiful. I don’t paint for people. I paint because what I see makes me feel something.”

“His personality comes through,” says Muncaster, who calls Roy an amiable soul. “There’s a smile to his paintings.” To capture the feeling of a landscape, Roy says he has to be in it.

As a result, says Muncaster, “There’s an immediacy about his work. A lot of energy.” It’s his response to the landscape that he captures, and it’s an outsider’s response. “It’s a harsh landscape, but it’s beautiful. He communicates that, and Newfoundlanders respond well to his work.”

Because of his approach and because he’s so prolific, Roy paints in nearly any weather, but says canvases aren’t built to match Newfoundland winds. Bungee cords and rocks hold his easels and canvases in place. In the cold months, he wears gloves. Bugs are a nuisance in summer. During the making of one painting bugs lighted in the wet oils, so he dotted each with pink.

After more than 50 years, Roy believes he has painted every community in the province, 842 in all. Some no longer exist, so his paintings have become a diary of the province as well. Alison Butler of the Emma Butler Gallery in St. John’s, which has carried his work for more than 30 years, says, “Jean Claude Roy’s love for this province has been immortalized in his joyful and gorgeous depictions of every geographical nook and cranny of this place.”

Each Newfoundland community appears in the massive 450-page tome he calls his four-kilogram book, Fluctuat Nec Mergitur ­— the motto for the city of Paris that translates as “(She) is tossed (by the waves), but does not sink.” A collection of his Labrador paintings appears in his book Terra Magna. Roy says he’s painted more than 10,000 works, many of them on large canvases, but adds his head is filled with a library of future compositions. “One lifetime is not enough,” he says.

For his dedication to capturing every corner of the province, Roy received the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador in 2023. At the ceremony, he stood shoulder to shoulder with six other recipients, including comedian Rick Mercer.

Roy deserves the tribute, but says he hopes one day his life as an artist will be memorialized in art. A strange project of his own may already have done so. Astonishingly, he’s kept every single empty tube of paint since he started. “I decided to make a sculpture out of them,” he says. The sculpture resembles a granite boulder, built from steel and fibreglass, covered with those flattened tubes of paint. “The little bits of colour that show are like the tiny spots of colour in granite.” Roy’s paint tube boulder pays homage both to his exceptional body of work and the Newfoundland landscape that inspired so much of it.