Chickadee, Kimberly Boychuk

Kimberly Boychuk

Wildlife and landscape painter Kimberly Boychuk has made it her life’s work to capture moments in time. She views her function as an artist as encouraging others to stop and appreciate the beauty around them. She points out that taking time to appreciate natural beauty, both in nature itself and through art, is one of life’s few pleasures.

“Something in me drives me to do something exquisitely beautiful. Every piece I do, I try to achieve that,” Boychuk explains. To Boychuk, beauty is obviously truth, and truth is beauty, much as it was to the poet Keats.

Having left Peace River to go to school in Idaho and to study at workshops with luminaries such as Robert Bateman, Boychuk has found herself more inspired by the natural beauty of her home in the Peace River valley. Her own appreciation for its rich natural beauty has increased as she regularly walks the local hills. She has begun to find herself on a quest to capture the distinctive light of the north. The long hours of sunshine and twilight at different times of year have caught her attention through the transient play of light on clouds, water and even snow.

Now, she finds, “Snow isn’t white in my mind. It’s pink, it’s blue, it’s peach, it’s purple.” She challenges herself to capture these vibrant colours in her own work, but without allowing her pieces to become a gaudy mess of colour. Instead, she wants people to become enchanted with the beauty of a piece without consciously realizing why.
“The light is the main thing I’m pursuing,” says Boychuk. “Before I would do a pond, and the subject would be the pond. Now it’s the lighting on the pond, and the pond. To make dynamic compositions with light, and realism – that is where I find peace and joy.”

Wolfboy, Stephen Kos

Stephen Kos

Stephen Kos also paints to show people beauty in places they usually ignore, but for him, beauty can be found in a salt stain on a bus floor. “There are universes there – uni- verses of intricate designs and depths,” he says.
Kos describes himself as “a bit of a surrealist,” a painter who uses familiar elements in unfamiliar and even fantastical ways. While there is humour in his paintings, it tends to be a black humour, a smile that shows sharp teeth. “I’m more interested in painting monsters than I am people or flowers,” he explains.

Although Kos is currently working on a series of children’s books featuring bright, colourful characters, the artist also taught art in Hong Kong for many years, and while there he held a solo show titled Fields and Monsters. It included a mini-monster series of paintings, with monsters of all types from cute to grotesque to threatening. His larger paintings on canvas tackled still more bogeyman, but took on subjects like evil and death.

Kos is a painter who brings the entire rich tapestry of child- hood imaginings to life. He understands the sense of joy and wonder we have as children goes hand-in-hand with a darker landscape, populated with fears and imagined dangers that still resonate with adults.

Runners, Lara Felsing

Lara Felsing

Painter and fashion designer Lara Felsing found herself be- coming more of a Peace River artist while living and working in another province. After growing up in Peace River, Felsing moved to Vancouver, where she received a Fashion Design Diploma at the Helen Lefeaux School of Fashion Design and a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Emily Carr Institute.

“The irony is that when I lived in Vancouver, a lot of my paint- ing series were themed after rural Alberta,” Felsing says. Her subjects became a birdhouse, or a bus in a snowbank. “I became enthralled with the colour of the Alberta sky, the co- lours of poplar trees. Imagery so obvious became foreign.”

Even her clothing designs expressed the same symbols for home. “At my last show in Vancouver, the theme was birds and buildings. I used stitching to represent railway tracks, and embroidery to represent flights of birds.”
Felsing has returned to painting and drawing as she’s re- turned to Peace River. Despite the fact she acknowledges drawing is almost a non-validated art form these days, for Felsing drawing will always be her first love. She finds draw- ing and painting more freeing than fashion design, since pattern drawing is a type of architecture of the body that can become almost mathematical.

Felsing says her recent work is a tribute to the simplicity of the every day, an attempt to capture “how little kids see things,” and then give that importance by placing it in an oil painting. Now that she is a parent, Felsing’s paintings have become permeated with nostalgia for a childlike sense of wonder, allowing a re-experiencing of childhood as an adult.

Janet Enfield

Wisdom of the Ages, Janet Enfield

There is a lot more to a Janet Enfield portrait than a face represented in two dimensions. Through her series, Wisdom of the Ages, Enfield is painting to express a legacy.

No one under age 80 is included in the series, which will show at the Prairie Gallery in April. The Wembley artist started with portraits of her grandmother and grandmother’s sisters and since has expanded it to include a total of thirty portraits.

In order to create a context for the paintings, which include the person and some images and colours that relate to their life story, Enfield visited her subjects, photographed them and asked them to fill out a questionnaire.

“I wanted to find out their favourite colour, favourite fruit, favourite animal,” she says. “Even a saying they always say.” She also asked them what they miss about the past and what they like about now and tried to put those feelings into her 24”x36” portraits.

Enfield admits that painting some portraits felt like a fight. “But when I’d be painting along and get lost, sometimes I’d look up and I could feel the person looking back at me,” she says, “that’s what really hooked me.”

Edward Bader

Mediate/Meditate, Edward Bader

“I finally found a way to integrate drawing and love of colour,” says Grande Prairie artist Ed Bader of his recent series Mediate/Meditate.

Based mainly on subjects Bader sketched on the bus or in public spaces, Mediate/Meditate shows us people going about their daily business while using cell phones, ipods or games.

“I looked at their whole body language,” Bader explains. “They are communicating but oblivious to their surroundings.”

Bader’s goal was to use a flat ground with patches of high key colour and add the linear elements last. “This is very much the reverse of most painting, “ he says. “As the consequence of thirty years of ink on paper, it was do or die by the drawing.”

The greatest challenge of painting the series, which Bader spent a year or so creating, was to be accurate in terms of proportion and gesture. The ultimate reward was his sense that the colour and harmony worked.

Mediate/Meditate, which was on display during November and December, 2009 in the Courtyard Gallery at QE II Hospital, Grande Prairie, consists of 4×5 foot acrylic canvasses and some small works, including watercolours built into multi-subject collages.

Darcy Jackson

Copperlily, Darcy Jackson

Usually, Darcy Jackson has a lot of information about the subjects of her portraits, but her Copperlily series, which she has returned to again and again over the last 15 years, is based solely on visual impressions of a person she’s never met.

“For a commission I talk to the person and find out their loves and passions,” she explains, “I want to know their philosophy of life and then show them their story illustrated.”

Jackson, who now lives in Tumbler Ridge and is self-taught, began by painting portraits of young children. “At that time I lived on the West coast among families from different nationalities and I began to enhance the portraits with animals and imaginative images,” she says.

The chance gift of a photo collection depicting Yukon natives connected Jackson to one subject in a very unexpected way. Over the years of painting Copperlily, Jackson began to notice that she was filling in the woman’s story without intending to.

“I noticed that in my first painting the eyes have such pain. Seven years later there’s wisdom and acceptance,” Jackson says. “The third has such a sense of peace. Surely this is just a reflection of my own journey.”

(The photograph was taken the day after I drowned.
I am in the lake, in the center of the picture, just under the surface.
It is difficult to say where precisely, or to say how large or small I am: the effect of water on light is a distortion
but if you look long enough, eventually you will be able to see me.)

It’s this kind of jarring incongruity that exists between the exquisite surfaces and the stories that lie (metaphorically) just beneath them in the Congo paintings of Peace River artist Larissa Doll.

Mama et Parapluie, Larissa Doll

Take the painting Cloud, for instance. The sun sparkling off the mirror-like surface of the water creates a sense of tranquility, the dark cloud above it promising life-giving rains. The view is of Lake Kivu, a large body of water shared by two troubled east African countries: Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Lake Kivu is the source of drinking water and a place for washing and swimming for many Congolese. It is also a place where poisonous gases released by lava flows from a volcanic eruption seep out of the lake along the shorelines. And it is also a place where, in 1998, the bodies of Africans killed in the country’s ongoing wars were left floating. It is a mass grave.

Doll lived in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo for two years between 2004 and 2006. She was there to paint on the strength of one Alberta Foundation for the Arts grant, and two more from the Eliza- beth Greenshields Foundation. The Congo is a country that is still at war after more than a decade of ethnic atrocities, though much of the world has forgotten about it. Doll says with both candidness and understatement, “the Congo is definitely … hard.” This is the simple truth that contains the deeper, more difficult truths.

While she was in Africa, Doll says, she had to focus on what was positive in order to survive. Her paintings from this time show not only the beauty of Lake Kivu, but also the beauty of women and children engaged in unexceptional activities. Doll is primarily a figurative painter and her paintings, like many figurative paintings, tell stories. What may be different about her works is the stories they do not tell; the context behind the canvases.

Mama et Bebe, Larissa Doll

Doll’s Mama et Bebe, for instance, depicts a beautiful baby happily nursing at his or her young mother’s breast. As uni- versal as this daily miracle is, in the story of this mother and this baby, Doll says, “it was truly miraculous.” The mother is a woman who was raped by a soldier in an everyday – though nonetheless horrific – use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. The baby is the result of that act. The wom- an was disowned by her husband and, as in many cases like this, might have disowned the baby in turn. But she didn’t. She chose to keep the baby, and is shown in a mo- ment of bonding; choosing family over hatred.

Mama et Parapluie shows a Bantu woman in a candid moment at the market, shading herself from the equatorial sun. Doll comments simply: “You can see by the expression on her face that she’s been through a lot.”

In Girls, two girls from the Inuka orphanage where Doll volunteered are caught in a candid and intimate moment, feed- ing each other and just being kids. However briefly, they were able to put the violence they’d witnessed, the illness and the death and the abandonment they’d known, aside. Given the context, the normal becomes transcendent.

Mama Laughing, Larissa Doll

Doll describes Mama Laughing as “an image of beauty.” Among the Congolese, fullness in a woman is considered to be highly desirable. More importantly, the painting captures the paradox of life flourishing in the midst of danger and vio- lence. Perhaps out of necessity, the Congolese “really live in the moment,” says Doll. If they are crying, they are not dis- creetly sniffling; they are wailing. But if they are happy, their laughter comes straight from the belly, full and round and uninhibited. They live life in extremes. In extremis.

It is in the painting Mama et Enfant, however, that Doll really creates an image of hope. This work depicts a 13-month- old girl who had been the victim of rape a few months prior. Her mother, having turned away for a moment to look after her other children, lost the baby to an armed militant. At the time of the incident, the mother left her bigger children to look after each other and walked many kilometres to the nearest hospital to get medical care for her baby. According to Doll, “when they arrived at the hospital the girl was only able to hold her bladder for a minute. Following surgery she was able to hold her bladder for three minutes. The doctors called it a miracle.”

In the painting adult and child are shown in a quiet moment, the mother doing up her little one’s shoe. As Doll describes it: “The infant leaned into her mother’s neck and clasped tightly to her shirt. A simple gesture loaded with truth, strength and optimism. It is a closed relationship where the two figures are intertwined….” Neither one’s face is visible; both have their backs to us. Together they form a closed circle. Doll felt that in depicting them this way, she was protecting them; giving them back to each other, refusing to re-victimize them.

Girls, Larisa Doll

Many of us grew up seeing images of African children alone and dirty, nearly naked, bellies distended, flies at their eyes. Designed to elicit the compassion of the more developed world, they nonetheless portrayed Africans as victims. Doll’s Mama et Enfant, on the other hand, shows Africans taking care of themselves; taking control in small ways in the face of horrendous circumstances. It gives at least these two Af- ricans (and they are actual individuals known to the painter) back their dignity. It diminishes those of us in the western world to the status of fellow human beings, rather than set- ting us up for the inevitable fall in the role of saviours; or worse yet, casting us as voyeurs of other people’s misery. “In the Congo series,” Doll writes, “it was important for me to empower each character…. My goal was to depict these figures as survivors, triumphing over tragedy and despair. I wanted to portray these women and children as symbols of strength and resilience. They should be celebrated for their strengths rather than pitied for their hardships.”

Doll’s paintings from her time in the Congo celebrate humanity in the midst of the most wretched inhumanity; but this, of course, is only part of the truth of her experience there. These paintings are exquisitely beautiful and humane. In contrast with the context that generated them, they seem almost like a denial of the larger truth.

One could also say, though, that they are like the planks of a life raft Doll fashioned for herself in order to survive the desperation of life in the Congo. Now that she is home in Canada, she is processing the more difficult aspects of her experience. Three years after returning, she says: “Now I feel like I’m ready. I can go back and paint the rest of the story.”

The new work will be “heavier,” she says. There will be more of the difficult things she saw and lived; the darkness as well as the light of her experience in Africa. There will be more of herself in it, she says.

But then in a way the artist is always in her paintings, like the drowned poet floating just under the surface. If you look long enough, eventually you’ll be able to see her.

There are two sets of eyes in every portrait, the eyes of the subject and the eyes of the artist.

The subject’s eyes we could call “the window to the soul”. Through the expressiveness of the eyes most human communication takes place. The eyes speak silently, but convey a myriad of nuance.

Really though, the eyes are sensory organs, they deliver information with- out opinion. It is the flesh around the eyes that moves and so creates and conveys expression. The startled lift, the narrowed gaze and the smiling corners are the curtains of the soul. The moving curtains, in time, become a person’s look. Those crinkles we don’t like to see in the mirror are pure gold to the artist.

The artist’s eyes deliver information; the artist’s hands must render it as accurately as possible. Where are the areas of light and shade? Where are the hidden muscles that create the gaze? What is it that defines this person’s look? Larissa Doll describes feeling with her eyes and Ada Lovmo tells us she looks at the face and sculpts it with her chalks. To Janet Enfield, it comes down to having the subject’s eyes look back at her from the portrait. Then she knows she’s not only accurate; she hasn’t just captured the person. They have captured her. The eyes in a series of Darcy Jackson’s por- traits not only looked back at her, they looked into her, revealing a map of her journey as a painter and as a person.

Mediate/Meditate by Ed Bader is the exception here that proves the rule. We rarely see his subjects’ eyes. An absence of expression highlights these people’s detachment from those around them and their extremely tight focus on abstract messages from afar. The curtains are open only just enough to let in the information they desire.

Meticulous observation by the artist is required to translate light and shade into an eye, a window to a soul, a person we can recognize. The observed play their part as they live and breathe, as they open or close their curtains. There must be a third pair of eyes to complete any picture; the viewer looks, believes and in a blink the portrait comes to life.

by Eileen Coristine

Grace by Kiren Niki Sangra

The Art of the Peace Visual Arts Association launched the Iskoteo Arts Festival with their first juried art show. In the show, which was displayed at the Glass Gallery in con- junction with the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Awards, 53 artworks ranging from paintings and pho- tographs to sculpture and fibre art, demonstrated the variety and excellence of our regional artists.

“Artists were challenged to submit work that met national standards for consideration in the show,” says Dale Syrota, president of Art of the Peace. “This show reflects the deep well of artistic talent that quietly grows in the Peace country.”

The jury consisted of Doug McLean, private art dealer and owner of the Canadian Art Gallery in Canmore, Karin Richter, Calgary artist and in- structor and member of CSPWC, ASA, the Cana- dian Federation of Artists and the Society of Cana- dian Artists, and Robert Steven, Director/Curator of the Prairie Art Gallery.

The winner of the first Award of Excellence was Grace, a collage of magazine paper circles on bamboo, by Kiren Niki Sangra. Second went to Island, an oil and mixed media by Ken HouseGo and third to Vase with Traditional Japanese Iron Ash Glaze, wood fired clay, by Bibi Clement.

Niki Sangra, currently the Creative Operations Coordinator at the Grande Prairie Centre for Creative Arts, says she was very surprised to have taken away the top award. “It is an honour just to be in the same show as Ken and Bibi, let alone winning.”

Sangra likes to work with a variety of media, especially found material and “green” materials that she can re-use. “Creating art makes me come alive and allows me to channel the ideas in my head into something I can share with others,” she says.

Island by Ken HouseGo

Ken HouseGo too, likes to give old objects and materials new life as artworks. “I respond with junk as well as painted and constructed material,” he says. “The world is a mixed material interface.”

“I was taken aback by this award,” says HouseGo. “I was delighted and pleased to be part of such a diverse show with a completely different group of people.”

Vase with Traditional Japanese Iron Ash Glaze, by Hythe potter Bibi Clement, was wood fired for 70 hours. “The color of this traditional iron ash glaze was a dream come true when we opened the kiln,” she says.

Steven explained to those in attendance at the show’s opening on June 16, that the jurors used a mathematical formula based on points for originality, skill and appeal to arrive at the three winning entries.

All three winners were awarded with cash prizes generously provided by event sponsor Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines.

As well nine artists received Honourable Mentions for their pieces. These were: Northwind, soapstone carving, by Grant Berg; The Argument, soapstone carving, by Leslie Bjur; The Tree Family, acrylic paint on canvas, by Vicki Hotte; Plato’s Cave, acrylic, by Carrie Klukas; Belong to Yourself, acrylic, by Kristine McGuinty; Make Hay, black and white photograph, by Katherine McLaughlin; Wild Peace, linocut print on paper, by Mary Parslow, Letting Go, photography print by Angela Patterson and Tree Studies- My House, acrylic and charcoal collage on paper, by Bernadine Schroyer.

Vase with Traditional Japenese Iron Ash Glaze by Bibi Clement

The jurors, who had so conclusively scored the three winners, all came up with different favourites for the category of Honourable Mention. “There was no duplication in choosing, each judge chose three different entries, said Robert Steven. “This tells us that appeal, skill and ability do not necessarily equal preference.”

“I was impressed with the talent that is found in Northern Alberta,” commented juror, Karin Richter. “My wish would be to have more artistic communication between the regions, something we all could work on in the future.”

All of the artists who entered their work for consideration received valuable feedback from the jurors. As well the entire show was exhib- ited from the opening until June 21 and presented a dramatic panorama for the enjoyment of those present for the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Awards Dinner.

“I would extend my congratulations to all the applicants for their efforts and works,” commented juror, Doug McLean. “There are some that will stay with me, and some that I wish were on the list, but sadly all cannot be there.”

Although not every entry was exhibited, all submissions to the show that were received by the deadline are presented in a virtual exhibition.

by Jody Farrell

The Art of the Peace Seventh Annual Symposium promises to be a three day love affair; a coming together of artists and art enthusiasts to celebrate, discuss and view art in its many forms, from that which hangs, or sits, or moves as artistic expression, to the actual buildings that exhibit those various works. Speakers will address what drives artists to make art in the first place and how we can keep promoting it as a staple of our life and culture. The symposium takes place in the brand new Prairie Art Gallery in Grande Prairie from September 18 to 20, 2009, and coincides with the sec- ond annual province-wide Alberta Arts Days initiative. This year’s AOTP symposium guest speakers include artist/in- structors Bev Tosh and Ken HouseGo, as well as Tony Luppino, former executive director of the Art Gallery of Alberta.

Works by Bev Tosh from her installation War Brides

Bev Tosh

Calgary artist Bev Tosh’s major touring exhibition One-Way Passage began over eight years ago with a large paint- ing she made of her mother as a young war bride. That artwork evolved into a passionate look at the thousands of women who married foreign servicemen during or following World War II. The overseas passage to their husband’s homeland was typically paid for by the host government.

In a Kelowna Art Gallery article about One-Way Passage, Tosh says the initial painting was made for her mother’s 80th birthday. The resulting exhibition combines “years of research and hundreds of personal interviews with war brides in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, England and the United States.” Of the 48,000 British and European women who married Canadian servicemen stationed overseas, approximately 44,000 women and their 23,000 children journeyed to Canada.

“Cargoes of women and children were deposited day and night, onto urban platforms and rural settings from coast to coast,” Tosh explained. “Most were claimed by husbands they barely recognized, seeing them for the first time in civil- ian clothes.” While the majority of women portrayed in One-Way Passage came to Canada, some, like Tosh’s mother, left this country as brides of Commonwealth servicemen who had trained here during the war years. “The exhibition,” Tosh says, “explores the rite of passage of leaving home physically, emotionally, and psychologically, and the passage of time and lifetimes.”

Tosh, who has taught at the University of Calgary and the Alberta College of Art and Design since the mid 1980s, has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions across Canada and internationally.

Tony Luppino

Who better to address a community with a brand new public art gallery about the importance of housing and promoting art than someone whose most recent job included getting a big city to back and build a similar, but bigger, public gallery?

Tony Luppino, former executive director of the Art Gal- lery of Alberta, has been a featured speaker both nationally and internationally. He has spoken, in many cases, about the changing times in museums and art galleries, and these organizations’ vital role in the community.

In his keynote address at Reality Check, the 2008 Alberta Museums Association Conference, Luppino talked about how museums and galleries worldwide “can enact positive and real change, and deliver more value to their constitu- ents.” Luppino’s own impact on the arts and business has garnered many awards and he was named one of Alberta’s 50 most influential people in Alberta Venture magazine in 2006.

The 84,000 square foot Art Gallery of Alberta, which in- corporates the former Edmonton Art Gallery building, is a focal point in that city’s downtown core. The Randall Stout design features a twisted ribbon of steel which wraps around the building. Construction challenges included the tight, urban site with its adjacent underground LRT line, and integrating the existing structure with the new design. The gallery is set to open in early 2010.

Ken HouseGo

Sailor Man Tattoo #1 by Ken HouseGo

This well-known Grande Prairie artist and college in- structor has a love for both making and teaching art that many, including artists and connoisseurs, credit for having enhanced their appreciation of the medium. His un- bridled enthusiasm is evident in his own colourful, whim- sical assemblage artworks, a new series of which were recently featured as part of the official opening exhibition of the new Prairie Art Gallery in the Montrose Cultural Centre.

Dan Wourms, a former Grande Prairie Regional College arts student and co-owner of Unique Gallery, is among those who have delighted in HouseGo’s visual arts fun- damentals class. While Wourms admits initial general consensus was that he was a little “out there,” HouseGo’s expressive teaching methods and commitment to helping each student get the most out of the class resulted in their grasping some of the most important art concepts.

“He’d usually be teaching us three things at the same time,’’ Wourms recalls. “He might yell, or jump up and down; anything to help drive home a concept in a way that each student, in whatever way they learned, might under- stand. By the end of the first semester, most of us found we’d made breakthroughs as to how to incorporate some of those fundamentals and technical skills into our art.”

HouseGo, whose artistic experiences include national exhibitions dating back to the seventies, as well as pub- lic commissions in Toronto, Prince Edward Island, and Grande Prairie, will speak about both the process of mak- ing art and his upcoming touring exhibition, Dreams Don’t Come With Titles, an Alberta Foundation for the Arts Trav- elling Exhibition curated by Prairie Art Gallery’s Todd Schaber and Missy Finlay.

Painting or drawing a landscape is one of the most challenging tasks any artist can choose. What might to the casual observer seem obvious and simple requires a complex set of skills. It isn’t enough to just be able to recognize that the view you are capturing is beautiful and worthy; the artist must also be perceptive and worthy.

For the audience, a landscape is either a satisfying journey into the artist’s world, or a bad trip into disbelief. Probably the genre most accessable to viewers, landscape is also the one they feel they know the most about. Confronted by an error in perspective or a wash of muddy colour, the viewer mutters, “That’s not what it looks like there.”

Landscape art demands a myriad of choices: What will be depicted? Does this call for panorama or detail, realism or interpretation? What medium would be best? What is it about this place that calls for expression?

Climate also challenges the Peace country landscape artist. As restricted as we are to being inside, it’s admirable that so many obviously live for the en plein air experience of sketching, painting and taking photographs. One might reasonably expect more still life and portraiture, yet the entries in the Art of the Peace Juried Art Show tell us that, as diverse as the works and genres in that show are, landscape art still predominates.

Though the demands are plentiful and rigorous, the local subject matter is divine. Next time you look out on a sunny, cloudy or snowy scene, grab your sketchbook, throw open the door, rip off your toque and throw it in the air. It’s always a perfect day for Peace landscape art.

Old Stone

There is a small toy-like blue boat that appears, made out of wood and fastened to the frame of one work, then drawn or painted in several others. There are “x” shapes, or maybe they’re crosses or stars; simple child-like houses, lighthouses, and grain eleva- tors; trees composed of balls or cones with cylindrical trunks. There are belaying cleats and mooring rings from small boats, as well as anchors. There are Milagros, small hand- made votive objects collected on a trip to Mexico and Santa Fe. There are hearts and hands, some of which are pointing upwards. And the moon. Always the moon.

There are stories being told here, but the narratives are not linear ones; they’re more like the kinds of narratives you find in dreams. The objects, images and places in HouseGo’s art function symbolically. They are representative only in the way that words are rep- resentative; they signify or refer to things outside of themselves. They are not literal depictions of them.

Anchor

HouseGo says, “Sometimes dreams and memories get mixed up, and dreams become like memory.”

His memory of the moon, for instance, is intimately connected with the time he spent when he was a child at his grandparents’ cottage in Lion’s Head, Ontario on the shores of Georgian Bay. It’s a place which still appears in both his dreams and his artwork. It was

Beacon Basillica

a place where he would get up early in the morning and go for three-hour walks along the shoreline, learning the land with his feet. For him, the daily ritual of “walking and looking was really important.”

The lighthouses, the watery landscapes, and even the upward pointing hands (from an old grave marker in a nearby cemetery) are all drawn from his memories and dreams of this place-time. Fragments are collaged and constructed to form a whole; each stroke, each image, and each object adding layers of meaning in HouseGo’s interpretation of that place and the events that happened there. These artworks are not landscapes as such, though they incorporate elements of the landscape. They don’t represent what anybody else would see looking out a window in Lion’s Head. They are what HouseGo refers to as “personal landscapes.” They are his very personal responses to what he sees.

HouseGo remembers: “As a child, making things and envisioning ideas was always an intense part of my life. The highlight of my summer holidays was making ‘stuff’ in my grandfather’s boathouse.”

It was there, he recalls, that: “At the age of 18, on December 11, 1968 at 8:00 p.m., less than twenty feet from that boathouse, I realized: I want to be an artist.”

That epiphany set HouseGo on a journey that took him first to study art at Humber College in Toronto, and later to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. Eventually he found his way here to the Peace Country, where he has spent most of his lengthy career teaching the visual arts at Grande Prairie Regional College.

Basillica

One might be tempted to describe HouseGo as a folk artist but for the level of his educa- tion. He himself says, “I would have made a great folk artist! Fortunately or unfortunate- ly, I have attended art school for too many years.” Although admittedly “inspired by na- ïve expression,” the simplicity of the shapes and the clarity of the colours in HouseGo’s work belie its conceptual complexity.

Still, HouseGo says, “folk art is indigenous” – it grows naturally from a specific place or environment – and this is also true of his own art. HouseGo’s work is very rooted; a natural outgrowth of the places where he has lived, the communities he has been a part of. It is also indigenous in the sense

that it is not about “some concept coming from a big urban centre.” He has learned in spite of his education that he doesn’t need to “paraphrase other people’s aesthetics to find (his) own work.” As he puts it, “I want to do work that is indigenous to myself.”

HouseGo would also say his art fits within folk art conventions in another respect: It is functional in a way that is perhaps analogous to the way one uses a handcrafted or hand painted piece of furniture. “My art is used,” he contends, “by the very activity of making it and living with it. If it breaks, I just fix it. What could be more obvious? Would you question fixing a wooden chair? If it can’t be fixed, it might be repurposed, trashed or used as kindling. I have used all four approaches as solutions in building my construc- tions.”

In HouseGo’s view, art may be invaluable, but it isn’t untouchable. While I visited him in his studio in the basement of his home, he was still making changes to the collection of works now showing as the Alberta Foundation for the Arts’ travelling exhibit, Dreams Do Not Come With Titles. While talking to me, he casually removed a carved snowman from the frame of one work and moved it to another where he decided he liked it better. He describes this process as “cannibalizing” one work to feed another: “This is just part of [that artwork’s] life cycle.” A work isn’t finished until it is safely crated, and out of easy reach.

I DoS

HouseGo contends, “Mixed media and collage are essential to my way of thinking and building.” He mixes a wide variety of media in his work – from traditional art materials to found objects to glitter. He also mixes “polarities of working modes in his construc- tions,” working at times two-dimensionally (painting and drawing) and at other times

three-dimensionally (carving, hammering, nailing, gluing). Sometimes he fabricates the objects he includes, as in the case of the upward-pointing hand cut out of sheet metal; other times he attaches objects that are pre-existing, that have had a life of their own. In some ways his work is functional, in other ways it is playful. In some ways,

his process is very controlled (as in the construction of the multi-layered frames integral to each work); in other ways, it is expressive (as in the scumbling and dribbling of paint).

HouseGo likens his art/life journey to the long walks he took as a kid on Georgian Bay. He says, “You know how you go for a walk and see something new each time? I’ve been learning how to do that through my art. I’ve been learning how to replenish my soul while on my journey.”

He sums it up: “The creative process connects me and anchors my life. For a moment in time, I am in that boathouse once again exploring my own creative vernacular temperament.”

by Jody Farrell

The Montrose Cultural Centre, the new home of the Prairie Art Gallery is in its final phase of construction

Grande Prairie’s Montrose Cultural Centre, located on the site of the former Prairie Art Gallery (PAG), is scheduled to open this June. The modern and airy downtown building is home to both a new gallery and The Grande Prairie Public Library. The PAG will double the former exhibition space with its 8,000 square foot expansion, while the library will feature 37,400 square feet on two floors. The facade of the historic Central High School that housed the PAG since 1975, and was damaged when its roof collapsed in 2007, will form the cornerstone of the Montrose Cultural Centre. Its repair is due to be completed by 2011.

Since 1975, Grande Prairie’s only public art gallery has produced a wide range of both professional visual arts exhibitions and hands-on programs. In its unstuffy, people-friendly environment, it helped foster an appreciation of regional artists, as well as national and international ones whose works adorn galleries around the world.

Public galleries are perhaps society’s most recognizable “goto place” for a peek at what’s in store for our future. Everywhere, as has always been the case, visual arts reflect experiences and changes that we all experience, often even before they’re recognized by the world at large. Robert Steven, PAG Director-Curator, tells us some of what we can expect from our own Prairie Art Gallery during its first years in its new home.

“It’s hard to guess what the future holds,” Steven says when invited to imagine what the PAG will look like in the years to come. “We may be fooled. Right now though, I see the art world fully adjusting to the information age.”

Steven points to the everchanging world of online communication. While until recently, computers offered a “read only” experience, the latest internet sites including YouTube and Facebook make the actual sharing of information possible. These sites’ democratic approach, with content entirely produced by the public and not the programs’ creators, have radically changed the way we relate to our world. It’s an appealing feature for the PAG, which seeks to engage its users in genuine and open dialogue about the visual arts.

“The Prairie Art Gallery space was initially created for art discourse,” Steven says. “We are looking to expand that with a content-rich interactive format on a regional and international scale.” Under Steven’s guidance, the gallery will amass information and facilitate research and interaction with artists, allowing visitors to enjoy a wide range of experiences, including the chance to be a gallery curator. Visitors will be invited to locate art images on computer and project their personal favourites onto a wall. Steven envisions a virtual library that contains the latest in international and national arts news, along with live web-cameras showing what a regional artist is doing that very day. He sees the ongoing dialogue between gallery visitor and artist as essential in keeping Peace Region art relevant and alive.

In his earnest conviction that Grande Prairie and the Peace area is home to some of this country’s most interesting visual artists, Steven is determined to make the PAG “the best little art gallery in the world.”

His multi-faceted plan begins with acknowledging a major obstacle for any gallery: limited storage. The 8,000 square feet that will be added onto the existing PAG heritage building will feature new exhibition space for works on loan, but will only store so much donated or purchased art. What space the new gallery has will have to do for the next 20 years.

Digital space, on the other hand, provides nearly unlimited storage at very little cost. Steven’s “best little gallery in the world” plans include creating “Peace Works,” an event he describes as a “tangible juried exhibition” with a famous guest curator whose presence would bring international exposure to the gallery, while introducing its new patrons to the PAG’s soonto- be virtual library of regional artists.

“Even the discourse an international curator creates will drive us to do more on an international level,” Steven says. “We cannot bring our artists to the world if the world isn’t looking.”

His long-range vision involves creating a sustainable endowment program that enables the PAG to eliminate fees and fundraisers altogether, and focus primarily on becoming a world-class visual arts information centre. Steven also dreams of developing a province-wide professional association whose goal is to make Alberta itself the “best place in the world.”

“People want us to do what we do well. Our job is to determine what that is and do it to the very best of our ability.”

The Montrose Cultural Centre will feature the 4,200 square foot Central Hall, an open, warmly decorated public facility that will feature artwork and comfortable meeting spaces for community and private use. The Cultural Centre will be a stunning new addition to Grande Prairie, visible even at night, creating an inviting downtown go-to place for decades to come.

Even if we’re looking at a two dimensional representation of a statue or a pot, it is measured and weighed by our previous experience and our curiousity.

Paul Qayutinnuaq’s meticulously crafted Inuit hunting tools represent things that were once everyday and functional. Through his dedication to making the ancient tools from their original materials, we are able to see the textures and imagine what it felt like to work with a bone knife or a fishhook carved from an antler.

There can be immense pleasure in making something that we know other people will want to pick up and use. Something thats very form gives them pleasure and thats function satisfies a need. A beautifully treened cup or pottery bowl can be a pleasure to look at, a pleasure to hold and a pleasure to use. What could be more pleasing to a sculptor than to create something like this?

The humble materials, stone, wood and clay speak to us of our human roots. In the right hands those same simple elements can evoke a prairie storm or imbue an angel with the magic of art. Imagine yourself eye to eye with a life-sized vessel full of Bibi Clement’s moods and memories. Then remember, she made it from mud.

The sculptor invites us to experience the sculpture: Do we want to touch it? Do we want to pick it up and use it? Or do we want to give it a hug?

Eileen Coristine, Editor