Andrea Simmonds at Gallery Merrick

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Andrea Simmonds, “Night Flower,” 2023-2024, mixed media on canvas, 36" x 60" (courtesy of the artist)

Energy — that of a vibrant biome — is captured in a cluster of paintings by Andrea Simmonds in her exhibition, Plant Life, on now through Oct. 19 at Gallery Merrick in Victoria, British Columbia. Her botanical visions pop off the canvas with colours and rhythms that hover between representation and abstraction.

Simmonds is inspired by hands-on work among plants and flowers. “I’ve worked with plants for a number of years, specifically at a native plant nursery where I do plant propagation, garden design, and restoration projects,” she says.

She has taken that experience and her paint brushes into a residency at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and will graduate with her master of fine arts degree in November. This program has amplified her focus and deepened her art-making.

The energy referred to is a result of strong improvisatory brushstrokes and repeating patterns, capturing the opposite of traditional floral “still life.” Her paintings are “lively life.” A viewer is drawn close, not held at distance, so feels vigour and a recontextualizing of beauty.

In some pieces Simmonds captures the root systems of plants, often rendering both above — and below — ground representations in a single painting. She is emphasizing a gardener’s knowledge that there is more than meets the eye. “Understanding root systems has helped me understand the plant behaviour in a more holistic way,” she says. “I’m always challenging myself, pushing to a place that embodies a liveliness, a site of cycles, something happening.”

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Andrea Simmonds, “Clay Soil,” 2024, vinyl and oil on panel, 14" x 18" (courtesy of the artist)

The canvas surface is also among Andrea’s concerns. In this modernist trope, canvas shows through where paint is scarce or not applied at all, and sometimes Andrea affixes rectangular pieces she calls “bandages” – canvas on canvas, disrupting the smooth plane. You are looking at material: This is paint and gesture, something made, not simply representation.

In Blackboard/Prairie Oak, the largest painting at four feet by eight, containing stacked black and white alternating bands, Simmonds has drawn and written – one might say scrawled – words among the botanical images. These name plants and the things that support or are supported by plants – lichen, moss, acorn, butterfly and so on. The style is rough, graffiti-like, referential, within stark contrasts. Its colour range sits at the other end of her often-bright colour manifestations. 

“I sometimes oscillate my palette, where it’s simplified, like black and white and beiges, and then I move into explosions of colour,” she says. 

A couple of medium-sized paintings suggest cosmic events — sunbursts, or meteorites, bright and kinetic.

Simmonds often makes preliminary watercolour marks and sketches in a small notebook. But on the canvas, as well as acrylic paint, she often uses oil sticks. “I smash the ends of the sticks onto the canvas because I really like the gritty texture,” she says. 

In some pieces, paint seems thrown onto the surface and occasionally paint drips flow, suggesting various wetnesses.

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Andrea Simmonds, “Underground,” 2024, mixed media on panel, 36" x 48" (courtesy of the artist)

Simmonds cites many influences, among them British painter Rose Wiley, Canadian Kim Dorland, and the Scot Elizabeth Blackladder. Looking at these painters one can see connections, perhaps in a shared aesthetic of edginess, renderings that I think of as playful “perfect imperfection,” or perhaps the flip of that.

About 15 paintings, in various sizes, comprise the show; the smallest, Clay Soil, is just 14 by 18 inches. “ Andrea has created a language of symbols for individual florals where there’s a naivety that people are finding refreshing,” Gallery Merrick owner Joe Bembridge says.

Her vibrant work is engaging in its spontaneity, its refusal to be static. It draws the eye back, and back again, to feel the charge. ■

Andrea Simmonds, Plant Life, is on view through Oct. 19 at Gallery Merrick in Victoria, British Columbia

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