Over the past few years, Mary-ellen Threadkell and Nancy Slaght have been meeting on Monday afternoons, and now present their first show together.
Slaght has a long professional career, and her pastels of birds were seen at Winchester Galleries until its massive shakeout of artists last year. Threadkell was the general secretary of the Victoria College of Art and then the executive secretary of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria for many years. At last she has found time to return to painting.
Now that she doesn’t have to meet the expectations of a commercial gallery, Slaght is showing off a different approach. No longer trapped behind picture-frame glass, as pastel requires, she is allowing herself more latitude.
“I tired myself out in the dust,” Slaght remarked, “physically and visually.” She has long worked with birds as a metaphor, and now she is ready to extend her story. “What I needed were materials which allowed for expansion.” She took up acrylic paints.
Over the years, Slaght added elements of collage to her paintings, bringing in sheet music, thread and feathers.
“I felt like the birds,” she remarked. “I’m a collector, a nest builder.” But what form would this gathering take? One day, she turned over the cradled wooden panel she had been painting on, and there it was — a box. As with the assemblages of American artist Joseph Cornell, she found her collections were at home in boxes, each like a tiny diorama.
“The only thing I need to consider now,” she smiled, “is how large.”
The containment of the little boxes gave her comfort and the confidence to open up.
“I like embellishment, accessorizing, putting things on my head,” Slaght said. “Making my own hats, fascinators, scarves and accoutrements. I’m not into working with clay, stone or wood. I wanted to work with more dimension, but with something that’s malleable and easy to work on in my apartment.” A workshop at Knotty By Nature led her to felting.
So Slaght’s pastels became paintings, the panels became boxes and are filled with felt nests and eggs. Her pleasure in discovery is evident throughout the gallery. In addition to birds, she collages in bits of old sheet music. Often her birds are perched on musical staffs, and ribbons of notes flow out of their beaks.
While collage is often a crutch for people who don’t know how to draw and paint, Slaght is equipped with plenty of talent, and extends these graphics from a golden age to create a marvellous flavour.
Threadkell, who has watched as Slaght assembled her birds and nests, says it’s a metamorphosis. Slaght is an artist bursting with ability and ready to take flight.
Threadkell herself realized, a long time ago, that she might not ever come out on top as an artist, but that she loved creative people, and their go-for-it attitude. Therefore, she determined to support musicians, dancers, actors, writers and visual artists.
“I’m passionate about supporting them. They are who we are: our voice, our essence, our culture. I’ll work in whatever capacity, to make it possible.”
While working in arts administration, she always sketched and recorded, thinking about painting and analyzing the colours she saw.
“It was a great opportunity, working at the art gallery, to see an amazing quantity of art,” she recalled. But she didn’t have time to paint. Now, after 20 years, this is her “coming out party.”
“I’ve begun again,” she told me, “and nothing is holding me back.” Her paintings are purely abstract, based on colour themes and how she sees, rather than subject matter.
“When my ideas start on the canvas, I have an idea for structure and composition,” Threadkell explained. “Composition is the vital structure for me. I love composition. Then, it’s about how one fills that, and moves through the composition. The spaces between, behind and beside are part of the journey.”
That sounds simple, but what does she mean? After sitting with her paintings for a while, I realized that she is not concerned with painting “things,” but articulating depth in space between them. Slaght, having watched her at work, spoke up to tell me how Threadkell does it.
“A couple of things that come through in her approach to design and composition: It’s all about the edges. She talks about knocking a hard edge off to a soft edge; about losing an edge to the space behind; and she constantly juggles the values-to-colour ratio. And always: edges, edges, edges.”
Once I understood that Threadkell was creating spaces through the variation of tone and colour, I realized that I could mentally take a walk through the situations she sets up. She doesn’t depend on perspective, but concerns herself with visual clues of what is in front and what is behind.
“I believe in the energies coming off everything,” she went on. “That’s why so many of my edges are soft, or disappear.”
Threadkell employs the elements of visual representations of volumes and space. Graduated tones, hard edges and soft edges, and complementary colours — these are what she has to work with. Though inspired by her vision of the world around her, her paintings are not transcriptions of things she has seen.
“However one gets the initiative to produce something really doesn’t matter.” It’s all about the composition.
And Slaght uses her skills in service of a narrative or a metaphor. Here are two very different artists who work together and have grown by the collaboration.
Reflective Responses: Mary-ellen Threadkell and Nancy Slaght, at Martin Batchelor Gallery, 712 Cormorant St., 250-385-7919, until March 30.
