Alice Teichert

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Alice Teichert, “Turning Point,” 2022, acrylic on canvas, 36” x 48” (courtesy the artist)

Soon after graduating from high school, I visited the Tate in London, where I saw Mark Rothko’s abstract paintings. I stood transfixed and, much to the security guard’s consternation, cried.

This memory floods back as I enter Alice Teichert’s show, Pulsar, on view until July 8 at the Peter Robertson Gallery in Edmonton. Gazing at her contemplative paintings, I recall Rothko’s uncanny ability to convey complex emotions through shape and colour. 

Yet Teichert’s work contrasts with that of the troubled American artist, who committed suicide in 1970, aged 66. Her vibrant canvases don’t plunge me into existential foreboding – they evoke existential joy.

When I describe my response to Teichert during our online conversation, she seems delighted but not surprised. In four decades of making art, she has heard many similar reactions.

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Alice Teichert, “Golden Silence,” 2022, acrylic on canvas, 55” x 40” (courtesy the artist)

A meditator in a visual poetry course Teichert once instructed told her she was “teaching yoga with colour.” Another admirer said meditating on one of her paintings had given her the strength to recover from surgery.

“When I hear stories like that I feel very useful,” says Teichert, whose studio is in Port Hope, east of Toronto.

For Teichert, painting itself is a form of meditation. She usually works in silence with only street noise and the clatter of the furnace penetrating her space. An avid reader with a keen interest in music, philosophy and semiotics, she doesn’t let book learning confine her. Instead, she waits for her thoughts to subside, and allows the paintings to tell her what they need. 

“It’s like surfing the waves,” she says with infectious enthusiasm. “You always stay open.”

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Alice Teichert, “What Do You Say?,” 2021, acrylic on canvas, 30” x 30” (courtesy the artist)

Teichert’s work emanates tranquility. Turning Point evokes the stillness of a prairie moonrise. Other paintings are more mystical. The sphere in What Do You Say is no longer a solid shape: it glows like an ephemeral beam of light, encompassing the entire canvas. 

The longer I look, the more I see. Many works, particularly Golden Silence, are serene spheres floating in boundless space – the illusion of depth enhanced by multiple layers of translucent paint.

Paradoxically, the simplicity of these forms conjures myriad associations. Are they the Hindu god Indra’s vibrating drums? Mythological cosmic eggs? Giant stars suspended in the night sky? Tunnels to other realms? Visualizations of the breath? 

Teichert offers no pat answers. Like all archetypes, her symbols encompass many meanings. To help me understand, she shifts our conversation to the influence music has had on her art. 

Teichert, who grew up in Belgium, was 12 when a psychologist, a family friend, asked her to draw the sound of the music her mother was playing. It was an epiphany.

“That’s how I learned to give voice to a line,” she says.

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Alice Teichert, “Fullspread,” 2022, acrylic on canvas, 55” x 84” (courtesy the artist)

To this day, when Teichert picks up a brush she becomes a conductor. Her orchestra has no cellists or violinists, only shapes and colours. But if we could hear her paintings, they might echo Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. 

As our conversation ends, I finally understand why Teichert’s work is so life-affirming. It’s the conscious choice she makes – she wants people to feel like they are walking into a garden. 

“There is enough sadness around me,” she says. “I don’t need that in my work. I try to rise above and beyond, and let the colour speak in full beauty.” ■

Alice Teichert: Pulsar at the Peter Robertson Gallery in Edmonton from June 8 to July 8, 2023. 

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