HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA | Sunday May 20, 2007es | Horoscopes | Comics | Tides | Bookm
Different strokes
Landscapes offer contrasting points of view
By ELISSA BARNARD Arts Reporter
The yin and yang of landscape is at Studio 21.
While Sara MacCulloch creates wide open spaces in minimal strokes of grey and green, Gerard Collins uses bold, high-contrast colours and crackling lines to describe the busy view inside and outside his studio in Golden Grove, N.B.
The energy is totally different in their works, Collins’s exuberant and uplifting, MacCulloch’s dreamy and calming. However, both artists are pushing their oil paint to be as descriptive as possible with less instead of more.
Collins joyfully describes clouds with mere buoyant outlines like a child’s energized drawing in his watercolour Windblown, a soft and sketchy rural painting. In Walter in the Wings the window behind a blue wingback chair holding a smug marmalade cat is a view onto an electric linear dance of tree trunks, more like an abstract painting than a landscape.
MacCulloch sweeps her brush delicately onto the canvas for strokes that feel like a soft breeze as they palely and elegantly create a space that is just conjured into existence.
MacCulloch’s landscapes are less directly personal than Collins’s. However, her universal landscape of horizontal fields beneath sky stem from time spent vacationing as a kid on the Minas Basin. She brings the sensibility of that landscape and a feeling of time spent quietly looking at it to other landscapes like a Cape Breton marshland or fields in France.
Her work here includes a giant scene in pale yellows of a vast birch grove, which has been purchased by the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, an unusual dusk painting with a low sun held in pale pink sky, a view up into the leafy tops of birch leaves in a painting with a powerful compositional force, and a denser painting of the deep blue centre of sky between two tree tops. MacCulloch’s angelic facility with paint is, as always, to be admired and even envied.
"What I like to paint is less about what specifically defines a particular place, and more about what makes it seem familiar," says MacCulloch, a NSCAD graduate. "It is the feeling of a place that I am after — something that can resonate with the viewer, whether they have been there or not."
Collins, who calls his show Clutter: View of the Studio Inside & Out, exhibits a wonderful series of chalk pastel paintings that really show off his facility with gestural line. They humorously depict the classic subject of the artist’s studio as a messy instead of a grand space. Collins’s studio is full of brushes in colourful tins with a worn couch pushed against the wall and paintings everywhere.
The Saint John artist’s oil and gouache paintings are striking and dense in colour with a rough delineation of shapes and forms. Particularly vivid is a yellow bush against the blue of the water, the Harbour Bridge in Winter and the Spring Landscape with Blue Shovel that again has a playful childlike quality. Other more traditional still life and landscapes still have the brilliant colour and joy in life.
"On a purely physical level, my paintings express a love of the materials of the art," says Collins. "On the conceptual level, my work springs from an obsession with beauty in all its forms. The work usually happens in two stages: the initial response to something beautiful (whether it be studio clutter, a landscape, flowers, objects, other artists’ work) and then the use of these images in series to express themes that have in turn become obsessions (including repetition, memory, and time)."
Both shows are on exhibit at Studio 21 Fine Art, 1223 Lower Water St., to Wednesday.
( ebarnard@herald.ca)
© 2007 The Halifax Herald Limited
While Sara MacCulloch creates wide open spaces in minimal strokes of grey and green, Gerard Collins uses bold, high-contrast colours and crackling lines to describe the busy view inside and outside his studio in Golden Grove, N.B.
The energy is totally different in their works, Collins’s exuberant and uplifting, MacCulloch’s dreamy and calming. However, both artists are pushing their oil paint to be as descriptive as possible with less instead of more.
Collins joyfully describes clouds with mere buoyant outlines like a child’s energized drawing in his watercolour Windblown, a soft and sketchy rural painting. In Walter in the Wings the window behind a blue wingback chair holding a smug marmalade cat is a view onto an electric linear dance of tree trunks, more like an abstract painting than a landscape.
MacCulloch sweeps her brush delicately onto the canvas for strokes that feel like a soft breeze as they palely and elegantly create a space that is just conjured into existence.
MacCulloch’s landscapes are less directly personal than Collins’s. However, her universal landscape of horizontal fields beneath sky stem from time spent vacationing as a kid on the Minas Basin. She brings the sensibility of that landscape and a feeling of time spent quietly looking at it to other landscapes like a Cape Breton marshland or fields in France.
Her work here includes a giant scene in pale yellows of a vast birch grove, which has been purchased by the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, an unusual dusk painting with a low sun held in pale pink sky, a view up into the leafy tops of birch leaves in a painting with a powerful compositional force, and a denser painting of the deep blue centre of sky between two tree tops. MacCulloch’s angelic facility with paint is, as always, to be admired and even envied.
"What I like to paint is less about what specifically defines a particular place, and more about what makes it seem familiar," says MacCulloch, a NSCAD graduate. "It is the feeling of a place that I am after — something that can resonate with the viewer, whether they have been there or not."
Collins, who calls his show Clutter: View of the Studio Inside & Out, exhibits a wonderful series of chalk pastel paintings that really show off his facility with gestural line. They humorously depict the classic subject of the artist’s studio as a messy instead of a grand space. Collins’s studio is full of brushes in colourful tins with a worn couch pushed against the wall and paintings everywhere.
The Saint John artist’s oil and gouache paintings are striking and dense in colour with a rough delineation of shapes and forms. Particularly vivid is a yellow bush against the blue of the water, the Harbour Bridge in Winter and the Spring Landscape with Blue Shovel that again has a playful childlike quality. Other more traditional still life and landscapes still have the brilliant colour and joy in life.
"On a purely physical level, my paintings express a love of the materials of the art," says Collins. "On the conceptual level, my work springs from an obsession with beauty in all its forms. The work usually happens in two stages: the initial response to something beautiful (whether it be studio clutter, a landscape, flowers, objects, other artists’ work) and then the use of these images in series to express themes that have in turn become obsessions (including repetition, memory, and time)."
Both shows are on exhibit at Studio 21 Fine Art, 1223 Lower Water St., to Wednesday.
( ebarnard@herald.ca)
© 2007 The Halifax Herald Limited
