Ann Kipling Finds Her Voice

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Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery

Ann Kipling, "Head," 1967

etching on paper, 22.2" x 15", Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery (gift of the artist)

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Ann Kipling, "Untitled (sleeping dog)," 1966

etching on paper, 11.4" x 20", courtesy of the artist

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Ann Kipling, "Landscape–Sea and Rocks," 1966

etching on paper, edition 3/16, 11.8" x 7.7", private collection

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Ann Kipling, "Untitled (two fish on plate)," ca. 1964

ink on paper, 10.8" x 15.6" Courtesy of the artist

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Ann Kipling, now in her 80s, is known for her steadfast dedication to drawing. But she didn’t start out with this singular focus.

Her groundbreaking evolution came between 1962 and 1967, after she moved from downtown Vancouver to the dense forests of the North Shore. This pivotal period is explored in Drawing the Line, North Shore Works, on view until March 25 at the West Vancouver Museum.

At the time, Kipling was barely out of the Vancouver School of Art, where she had been inspired by expressionism and was taught that drawing was not a work of art unto itself but rather something done to support a greater purpose.

Tramping through mossy forests with paper, pen and ink, and sometimes even a copper plate and diamond-tipped etching tool, Kipling began to explore a new way of seeing the world around her. She eventually dropped printmaking, realizing drawing was what she needed.

The exhibition, guest curated by Robin Laurence, reveals the development of Kipling’s unique visual language. Those early drawings are filled with the recurring curly lines, crosshatches, curves and swoops – often densely layered to produce multi-dimensional perspectives – that would mark her mature work. Their visual lyricism is already unmistakably hers.

One of the show’s earliest pieces, Tree, made on paper with water colour, ink and gouache, is a transitional work that’s still infused with colour and other evidence of expressionism. But the strength of the underlying ink lines is clear.

That piece is followed by drawings of dogs, fish, people and landscapes in which every wispy line (and there are hundreds in most drawings) appears carefully placed. All embody the life energy often remarked upon by critics. One of the earliest assessments was by the late Doris Shadbolt, who wrote in 1976 that Kipling’s work holds a “secret psychic energy” and artist and nature “seem to vibrate together, to share the same life.”

There are formal connections whatever the subject of these early works. For instance, the ridges of a dog’s backbone and belly can look like a treed hill. And the reverse is also true: A forested mountainside seems to show the hind end of a horse merging into the scene.

Kipling left North Vancouver in 1965, moving farther along the coast to the tiny community of Sunshine Falls, on Indian Arm. For the next two years, she went out every day in a small rowboat to “see” and “draw.” She moved again in 1967, eventually settling near Falkland, a small town in the B.C. Interior, where she continues to lug paper and drawing board up the steep hills behind her home so she can draw the vistas surrounding her.

Another show that features later work by Kipling is showing until March 25 at the Kamloops Art Gallery. Gestural Terrain is composed of selections from a substantial donation of work from Kipling to the gallery.