In 1967, a major shift occurred in Gershon Iskowitz’s work. He hired a helicopter to travel from Winnipeg to Churchill, Manitoba. Seeing the ground through the clouds from the air for the first time transformed the picture plane for him: “My paintings are not abstract. They’re real. They’re very, very much real. I see those things.” Like other Iskowitz works from this period, December No. 1 is both abstraction and landscape, seen by the eye of the artist in the sky._