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Latest NewsWater & CarbonWATER & CARBON LIFELINES: BRINGING LINE DRAWINGS TO REALITY WITH WATER & CARBON MARY CHRISTA O'KEEFE / marychrista@vueweekly.com Outdoors, summer is ripening, offering a heady profusion of colours among its many other sensory pleasures. Inside Profiles Public Art Gallery, though, the palette is limited to cool inky blacks and shades of grey on white and cream paper, suggesting the physical with texture, form, light and mark-making rather than kaleidoscopic hues. The six artists in Water & Carbon span generations and styles, and their drawings range in subject, but they rely on observation—the pieces may not all be literally drawn from life, but they are certainly all interpretations of the real world, as contemplative as poetry, imbued with intimacy and aliveness. Amie Rangel and Jennifer Bowes both offer near life-sized classic nudes, portraits that seek to discover an aspect of each human sitter without any tells of environment or adornment. Rangel, an emerging artist working on her MFA in Drawing & Intermedia at the U of A, has had outstanding work in the past few group drawing shows curated by Helen Gerritzen and Joan Greer at the AGA. Her pieces here are entirely different—likely so she doesn’t reveal the thrust of her grad show in November—but demonstrate the characteristic precision, sensitivity, and intent of her markmaking. The marks of BC-based Bowes are looser, forceful and expressionistic, with an appealing immediacy and sensuality. Bowes and Rangel’s nudes rebuke the artificiality of most still images of people we encounter nowadays—after the ubiquitous continuous assault of perfection, it’s refreshing to see human forms revisited with a gaze that allows for complexity and individuality and sells absolutely nothing. Gerald St Maur’s lavish drawings are nearly photographic in their realism and delicacy of lighting, but have an Eastern contemplative quality haunting them. He’s captured moments of intense communion with nature, but rather than present them as pure landscapes, his perspectives —with one exception, looking upward through trees—invoke the human observer. Natural elements are abstracted in Ihor Dmytruk’s process-heavy work, essentialized to undulating lines, eddies of shaded greys, turbulent textures and patches of paper scraped bare, recalling the heaving patterns of clouds, water and wind blowing across sand. Hung together, they have a beautiful rhythm, of sorts, as your eye sweeps over them. Paddy Lamb’s drawings exist somewhere between realism and abstraction—the local artist has papered a wall with his small gestural works, little scenes of spaces and vistas that have snagged in his mind and been disgorged into sketchbooks in blue and black ink with urgency and a bracing energy. These are whirlwind adventures into crowded memory, sprightly and warm. In contrast, Monica Fraske-Bornyk’s India ink drawings, from her “Muses in a Marsh” series, are meticulous and concentrated, anchored on icy paper, surrounded by white space. The Saskatchewan-based artist has focused her rendering of nature on a peculiar in-between microcosm: forked branches of trees or twigs—any sense of scale is erased in her modestly-sized pieces—framing the delicate, erratic architecture of insects or other mysterious weavers. Taken together, the drawings in Water & Carbon cover an expansive spectrum of life, from the eight-legged to the wildest elements, proving that vibrancy need not come in colour. V > More News |
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Contains copyrighted materials by Paddy Lamb