A STUDY IN CONTRAST, The Scott Gallery, Edmonton, May 8 to May 25, 2010
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"Forest Passages #1: Rebirth"
Arlene Wasylynchuk, "Forest Passages #1: Rebirth," 60 x 24”, oil on canvas.
2 of 5
"Tree Trunk 4"
Pat Service, "Tree Trunk 4," 30 x 24”, acrylic on canvas.
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"Tree Trunk 2"
Pat Service, "Tree Trunk 2," 30 x 24”, acrylic on canvas.
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"Forest Passages #5: Awakening"
Arlene Wasylynchuk, "Forest Passages #5: Awakening," 24 x 72”, oil on canvas.
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"Forest Passages #1: Rebirth"
Arlene Wasylynchuk, "Forest Passages #1: Rebirth," 60 x 24”, oil on canvas.
A STUDY IN CONTRAST: PAT SERVICE – REGARD AND OTHER NEW PAINTINGS AND ARLENE WASYLYNCHUK – FOREST PASSAGES
The Scott Gallery, Edmonton
May 8 to May 25, 2010
By Ross Bradley
From minimalism to expressionism, the recent work by Pat Service and Arlene Wasylynchuk explore the landscape from seemingly opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. Service, from Vancouver and Wasylynchuk, from Edmonton both share a passion for the western Canadian landscape and a link to the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshop in northern Saskatchewan dating back to the 1990s.
For four decades beginning in 1955, this annual summer workshop was a western Canadian response to the Toronto-based Group of Seven who had defined Canadian painting up until that point. This new approach to landscape painting explored the western topography and captured the distinct light of the prairies as embodied in the work of such diverse Saskatchewan-based artists as Otto Rodgers and Dorothy Knowles. In the early years there was a pervasive influence from New York with workshop leaders including Barnett Newman and Clement Greenberg. As suggested in the Canadian Encyclopedia “Their association with American post-war modernist art has possibly made these individuals responsible for giving the Emma Lake workshops a modernist focus. To attribute the entrenchment of modernist art on the prairies to the influence of Emma Lake and its leaders, however, discounts the importance of the effects of geography…”
Though working on the west coast, Pat Service’s approach to the landscape clearly reflected the influences of her summers at Emma Lake. The new millennium however, saw a fairly dramatic swing to a much more minimalist approach to the landscape, reducing the elements to relatively flat amorphous forms in muted tones, often bearing little colour relationship to the actual subject. In the new series, we see an introduction of some more detailed elements which more clearly define the spaces as landscape while playing creatively with the concepts of linear and atmospheric perspective.
The least successful of these new acrylic canvases are the four portrait works which struggle to combine the minimalist approach with the graphic elements needed to define the figures. Reminiscent of the American portrait painter Alex Katz, they lack the resolution of the much more successful Tree Trunk Series, in which these three strong canvases bring together all the elements from the explorations of the last decade. Tree Trunk #4 offers an elegant composition that defines the subject while it transcends the pictorial. As stated in the introduction to the exhibition “By the simplification of a complex subject matter Service is liberated to be more inventive with colour, shape, and line, reflecting her love of the material quality of the paint itself.”
In stark contrast to the quiet contemplative canvases of Service, are the energetic oils of Arlene Wasylynchuk. In the artist’s statement from her previous exhibition she states “My paintings disconnect the environment, reassembling it in multiple layers and perspectives that compel the viewer to search for subject, meaning and intent. Mark making, colour, composition become narratives of the complexity of our relationship to our environment.”
Her new work is a logical progression which has moved steadily toward an expressionist interpretation of the landscape from the earlier representational approach. Unlike Service’s simplification, Wasylynchuk has compounded the information with layer upon layer of brush strokes dancing across the canvas. As seen in “Forest Passages #1: Rebirth 1,” she demonstrated her strength in the studied application of vibrant colour that sometimes defines and often defies the pictorial space. At times this process loses its focus and can become muddled or muddy but the visual rhythms of the works and the freshness of the colour bring the viewer back to the overall strength of the composition.
Reflecting the diversity of the Western Canadian landscape from the vast prairie to the Boreal Forest, these two artists are a study in contrasts. An artist must continue to explore or risk stagnation. The change can be dramatic or subtle but just when you think you can define an artist’s direction, they are likely to veer off in a new direction that will take both the artist and the viewer by surprise.
