Belonging
Jane Harington's painterly florals and landscapes seek the emotional pull of place.
Jane Harington, "Landed," 2019
oil on canvas, 48" x 60" (photo courtesy The Gallery/Art Placement, Saskatoon)
Jane Harington’s show, Belonging, includes paintings of flowers and landscapes. But she doesn’t much differentiate between her subjects.
“I try to make my florals look like landscapes and my landscapes look like florals,” she says of the work she’ll display at The Gallery/Art Placement in Saskatoon from March 7 to April 16.
Landed, for instance, shows an unremarkable swathe of prairie. A riotous tangle of vegetation in the foreground is set against a calmer distance that feels almost like a mirage.
What’s most important, says Harington, is the way painting allows her to explore her thoughts and emotions about human experience, such as the need to belong.
Jane Harington, "Big Blue", 2020
oil on canvas, 40" x 72" (photo courtesy The Gallery/Art Placement, Saskatoon)
Harington has lived in Saskatchewan for 28 years but says her sense of being from somewhere else has never left.
She grew up in Zambia and Zimbabwe and studied literature at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, graduating in 1978. She completed a Bachelor’s degree in fine arts at the University of Saskatchewan in 2004.
With Landed, she says she wants to capture a sense of vast space as well as the feeling of being in a specific place – evoking the sound of wind in the grass and the smell of prairie flowers, for instance – while also pondering larger philosophical questions about how humans define themselves in relation to place.
Jane Harington, "Farm," 2019
oil on canvas, 48" x 60" (photo courtesy The Gallery/Art Placement, Saskatoon)
Her work is lush and painterly – she uses thick oil paint and energetic brush strokes that yield loose and gestural compositions.
As she says in her artist’s statement, she wants to express the poetry of everyday life.
“My work explores the emotional and gravitational pull of place, from the distant horizon, the scratch and tangle of scrub and grass, the lush and fleeting beauty of a mass of blooms. I explore the connections between us and the places that sustain us – those that we know, love or long for.” ■
Belonging is on view at The Gallery/Art Placement in Saskatoon from March 7 to April 16, 2020.
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the Gallery / art placement
238 3 Ave S, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7K 1L9
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