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Exhibit features work of architect-turned-artist

If you set up your life just right, you too could make the leap that Teryl Mullock has made.
Painting
Teryl Mullock with the mixed-media work Monk’s Dream, one of his submissions to the latest Arts Centre exhibition.

If you set up your life just right, you too could make the leap that Teryl Mullock has made. 

An architect for nearly 40 years, Mullock closed his Gibsons-based business practice in January and now is focusing on his second career as a mixed-media visual artist – when he’s not singing and playing guitar with the local Billy Hillpicker Band. 

Mullock’s work makes up half of the two-artist exhibition Textures and Fragments that opened at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt Sept. 12. He’s had no regrets about the life change. “It feels fantastic,” he said in an interview at his Gibsons studio. “I’ve just been exploding with it.” 

The unexpected inspiration to go in a new direction arose at a two-week retreat in Spain three years ago, said Mullock. “It was just a holiday, an art and yoga retreat. But the art part of it grabbed hold of me in a profound way. I felt, ‘Wow, this is something I actually have to be doing.’ I didn’t realize it was missing from my life.” 

There is, of course, art in architecture. But planning and designing buildings requires a lot of conceptual work in advance. Mullock’s approach to painting, he said, has liberated him from that cerebral front-loading. “I have no idea where it’s going to go. I start the process and wherever it goes, it goes. I want to create a situation that I can’t control and that I have to react to.” 

What at first appear to be paintings, on closer examination, are revealed to be mixed media. Mullock said the works begin as sheets of paper he’s dropped onto pools of acrylic paint. “I peel the paper off the paint and whatever is on the paper, that’s what I’m working with. If there’s not enough colour on it, I do it again.” The sheets then get arranged on large canvases or boards and might get sanded down to smooth out any lumps and reveal what’s underneath. “Then I look at the colour values and see what it needs and do any over-painting.” 

The exhibition at the Doris Crowston Gallery at the arts centre, which runs until Oct. 13, also features the work of Vancouver mixed-media artist Monica Gewurz. The show is an intriguing blend of two artists who both create organically inspired, multi-layered and textured abstracts. 

“[Gewurz’s] paintings reflect the scope of imagery as viewed from the vastness of space or through the lens of a microscope,” the Sunshine Coast Arts Council said in a release. 

There’s an opening reception for the exhibition at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 15. Mullock will also do an artist’s demonstration of his process at 2 p.m. on the following Sunday, Sept. 22.