A Brush with Creation

A Brush With Creation

A Brush With Creation features two friends who have exhibited together in the Hope Arts Gallery Back Room for several years--Jenny Wolpert and Shirley Wotherspoon.

The first impression from the threshold of the room is awe, incredulity. So many pieces, so much work, new work, all completed since last year's show. Almost overwhelming. You tell yourself to focus: on this wall, then this wall, then this, and this, and this.

To your right, Shirley has two jewel-toned crazy-quilt inspired stitched fabric landscapes, "Mountain Lake", "Moons Up", with four large acrylic landscapes. Straight ahead, Jenny's two colourful quilted fabric hangings, "Legends of the West" and "Flight to Freedom" are featured, along with digital collage paintings beside oil paintings and encaustic paintings by Shirley. The end wall features a large mixed media painting of Jenny's, "Dancing to the Exit", its yellows repeating Shirley's fall landscape above it. The fourth wall holds a mixture of acrylic paintings and smaller watercolour landscapes by both artists, and a shelf with small paintings and Jenny's pine needle sculptures and decorated gourds. The gourds are trimmed with stitchery and painted with a mysterious hieroglyphics first seen on the hanging featured behind the front desk. This object, some sort of fabric--is it plastic? is it leather?--attracts first by its uniqueness. It is peach-coloured with a grey shadow pattern, over-stitched, scribed with those same turquoise shapes giving an impression of glyphs, as if the shapes contain/conceal/reveal meaning. "Stelae of a Passing Culture: History detectives speculate about the rise and fall of culture. Why did this civilization fail? Will they identify the lowly pine beetle?" Aha, the subtextual pattern is that of the stains in pine-beetle-destroyed wood.

Although their work is very different, there are always surprising connections between these two artists. Exuberant colours. Nature. Explorations of several different media each. Shirley uses acrylic, oil, and watercolour paints as well as encaustic and fabric to portray natural objects, scenes, and settings. One painting shows a cabin on Mt. Ogilvie, another a bear popping out of a bush. The other nineteen pieces show no signs of human habitation beyond a footpath which could just as easily be a deer trail. It is as if she has chosen to focus upon Beauty and Peace, and to explore that beauty in several different media.

Jenny's work--fabric art, acrylic and watercolour paintings, photography, digital collage, pine needle weaving, decorated gourds--tends to feature symbolic and mythic creatures such as coyote, salmon, and eagle in the fabric art, or swans, bears, and butterflies in the collages, dead trucks, and humans moving through a landscape. There are men in meaningful pursuits (walking with briefcase on highway, exploding) or girls (in adolescent glory, rising from a sea shell, dancing with trailing ribbons) in allusive and symbolic poses. Jenny also engages viewers with the written commentary to each work, explaining some of her own observation, inspiration, or interpretation. The comments in many of these captions suggest that Jenny works to transform anger into art, pain into beauty.

Two different artists. One great show, in the Back Room at the Hope Arts Gallery, Hope, British Columbia, until September 28, 2008.

Collage Workshop

Collage Workshop

The Collage Workshop two Saturdays ago was wonderful. Organized by the art gallery for Arts and Culture Week, twelve of us sat at a big table cutting and pasting for seven hours straight. This is an art form I love, making something out of nothing, recycling, appropriating the beautiful images from magazines and using them for something other. And there were twelve totally different results. It’s the creative process that interests me. Why do this? Because it’s fun and challenging. What to do with the end project when it’s made? Well, in this case, they are framed and hung in the gallery for a while, and then ready to hang at home. So the collage will have a decorative element, and must be appropriate for public display. No problem. But what to do? What image? What colours? What will it look like? What will it say?

We looked at examples in the gallery’s Collage Exhibit, which included some three-dimensional sculptures. The facilitator suggested that we could pick a favourite photograph and “transcribe” it into a different medium; we could make a montage of words or images; we could do something inspired by the special papers or the clippings we find. I checked the list of ideas I had before the workshop and decided to go with the Breakthrough engraving. I don’t know the artist’s name but I think it’s an engraving from the Renaissance, of a man on his knees crawling away from the civilized fields and the one tree and bursting through the circle of the globe into a light-filled heaven. I call it Breakthrough but it’s probably meant to be a “pilgrim’s progress” genuflecting, prostrating oneself into heaven.

I know I respond especially to colour; I found myself collecting clippings of gold, sand, white, and blue. An abandoned cheese tray was the template for the circles. My collection of bride images yielded only one suitable clipping. I found a beautiful bare tree in shades of midnight blue. When I tried to explain what I had done to some at the table, I realized that in my “restorying” of this image, a female figure is moving in the opposite direction, up from a white seashell beach through music into an earthworld of darkness and pain and beauty. I cannot say that evolution was my intended theme; it was just that I couldn’t find a figure facing the other direction. That might be biological determinism, as our magazines are all laid out to open on the right. Whatever the reason, in my collage, earthlings emerge. Such is the creative process.

I check my dictionary. Collage: a kind of surrealist art in which bits of flat objects, newspapers, cloth, pressed flowers, etc., are pasted together in incongruous relationship for their symbolic or suggestive effect. Montage: the art or process of making a composite picture by bringing together into a single composition a number of different pictures or parts of pictures and arranging these, as by superimposing one on another, so that they form a blended whole while remaining distinct. Why didn’t I look these up sooner? The title of my montage is ReStorying.

The dictionary also reminds me that my favourite medium is words.