Madrona Gallery, 606 View St., 250-380-4660
West End Gallery, 1203 Broad St., 250-388-0009
Legacy Art Gallery, 630 Yates St., 250-721-6562
Winchester Modern, 758 Humboldt St., 250-386-2773
Winchester Oak Bay, 2260 Oak Bay Ave., 250-595-2777
Gallery in Oak Bay Village, 2223a Oak Bay Ave., 250-598-9890
The other day, Michael Warren, owner of the Madrona Gallery, noticed me poring over a painting of an Italian hill town by Charles Comfort.
He pointed out that when connoisseurs go through his gallery they tend to step back and consider the work from a distance. When artists come to have a look, they bend closer and peer at every brush mark. An artist myself, I peered closely at the paint handling. When I go to galleries, I’m often deconstructing the art works before me, considering the colour choices and sequences of layering that go into a painting.
Up the road at West End Gallery, Stephen Armstrong’s landscapes convey an impressive understanding of our West Coast shores. Armstrong paints with a deliberate and systematic approach — trees may be underpainted in black, highlights added on top in green or yellow, shadowy branches touched with blue and purple. The bark on the black trunks is lightly scumbled with pastels of mauve and sienna. That’s the sort of thing I am thinking about when I lean in and study Armstrong’s work.
West End also features the very talented Ken Faulks, whose little landscape panels of thick oil paint take up where the Group of Seven left off. He paints the local waterfront with rich and deliberate gobs of paint, achieving a sunny effect in his cloudscapes, which I liken to French vanilla ice cream. Faulks lays on the paint, stroke by stroke, in the Van Gogh manner.
At West End, I always seek out Quebec’s Claude Simard. Currently in stock is a café scene, drawn in his loopy way atop a ground of burnt sienna. I notice that he uses green mixed with black as the deep tone in his compositions. Simard’s mastery is delightful but eventually inexplicable.
A propos of colour mixes, I was stopped in my tracks by the paintings of Harry Stanbridge. Winchester Modern has a canvas on which Stanbridge painted concentric circles the size of dinner plates. Their colours were graded toward the circumference and result in a halo effect at the edge.
These circles create an “optical burn” in my eyes, and when I look at the neutral ground next to them, I see ghosts of the circles dancing on my retinas. Similar circles were painted here and there and then submerged behind a neutral wash of paint. My eyes swim — am I looking at the painted surface, below the surface or at an effect that only exists in my eyes? You got me, Harry!
A similar Stanbridge canvas hangs on the third-floor mezzanine of the University of Victoria library, next to the huge mural by Jim Gordaneer, his ultimate statement of topologies. The curator of the University Art Collections, Mary Jo Hughes, told me recently that among the thousands of artworks dispersed throughout the campus were some that had been designated cultural property and had to be retrieved from halls and offices and brought into proper care.
Some of the finest are on show at the university’s downtown Legacy Gallery. Myfanwy Pavelic’s exquisite teenaged self-portrait, two watercolour gems by Charles John Collings, and work by Jack Shadbolt and Emily Carr are in the mix. My personal favourite is Max Bates’ portrait of his wife, Charlotte. Somehow, with blunt, black drawing and patches of uninflected colour, Bates renders a powerful and haunting study of this woman.
Watercolours present another range of challenges. The lighter tonality of watercolour, compared to acrylic or oil, can result in rather insipid effects. Because with watercolour the whites are “reserved,” which is to say they remain as unpainted paper, the artist must begin with a perfect drawing to determine the blank spaces first. The background then must be washed up to meet the edge of the foreground elements perfectly, or the illusion of the picture is disturbed.
Sheena Lott’s illustrations at Winchester Oak Bay sometimes suffer from these shortcomings. Compare her work to that of Fenwick Lansdowne at Winchester or Brian Travers-Smith or Harry Heine (at the Gallery on Oak Bay Avenue) and you’ll see how a very confident artist works the medium. Perhaps to escape the limitations of watercolour, Lott has added larger, more generous oil paintings to her repertoire.
Also at Winchester in Oak Bay, Terry Fenton rings the changes on blue. Fenton comes to Victoria with a huge reputation as a gallery director in Edmonton, where he promoted Canadian and American “flat” abstraction. Now living in Victoria, Fenton gazes at the horizon and sees the fields of colour over Juan de Fuca Strait. And every now and then, he adds a note of illusion: A wave, a mountain peak or even a sailboat, intrudes. What was heresy in Edmonton has become irresistible in Victoria.