Painting the Whyte

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People can have strong connections to the objects in their life. Artists, in particular, are often avid collectors. But few are as active as the late Catharine and Peter Whyte, Banff artists who were instrumental in establishing the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies.

Catharine Robb, a debutante from a wealthy American family met Peter in the 1920s when they were studying at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. They married and she followed him to his home in Banff, where they began amassing the art and regional artifacts that would form the basis of the institution’s collection. The couple built a log cabin in the 1930s near the Bow River that became part of the museum after Catharine’s death in 1979.

It was the cabin and its eclectic mix of memorabilia – gifts from friends, random purchases and things the Whytes picked up on their travels – that fascinated Calgary artist Barbara Milne. She spent months exploring the collection, foraging through the cabin, as well as the museum’s archives and vault, and photographed myriad objects. Then, during a 2015 residency at the Banff Centre, she cut up those images and created a series of collages. When Milne returned to her studio, those collages became her gateway into acrylic paintings that evoke a musty modernism.

Both collages and paintings are showing at the Paul Kuhn Gallery in Calgary until May 6 as part of Milne’s solo show, Responding to the Whyte. “They all grew organically from the experience of being in the cabin,” says Milne. First shown last fall at the Whyte, the work creates an intimate sense of time and place with its odd distortions and angular juxtapositions of recognizable objects and mountain landscapes in a muted, earthy palette.

The paintings, on wood panels with the grain still visible, carry an echo of the cabin’s walls, which Milne describes poetically as “a thin membrane between inside and outside.” She captures a sense of dim interior light, with its dark corners and faded tones. The objects she portrays – a cast-iron frying pan in one painting, books and a ceramic vase in another – can be mundane. Yet making the collages allowed Milne to evoke a sense of the unexpected that parallels the sensations she felt as she pulled open drawer after drawer. Milne also credits the collages with helping her avoid the sentimentality that often mars work dealing with memory and time’s passage.

Most paintings are square, a conscious choice to suggest things crated or in storage. In some,  there are painted references to boxes. For instance, in Volume #18, a diptych based on an old postcard of Lake Louise, the box is suggested by a subtle angular shadow at the top. It  suggests one is unpacking a vintage landscape, but also resembles a wall or building that presages the human development that now encroaches on the park.

The paintings – like the cabin – offer a strong sense of human occupancy. But a good part of their power may reside in Milne’s musings – about presence and absence, what we collect in our lives and what happens to it after we die.

The Whyte’s curator of art and heritage, Ann Ewen, notes that Milne’s work reflects her ethics as well as her aesthetics. “Milne pondered ideas about stewardship and questioned what endures, what holds value and why,” Ewen notes in the exhibition catalogue. “As with most who contemplate a household purge, that which is saved is a subjective affair. An item of significance to one holds no importance for another.”

Milne recently helped her parents move from a home they had lived in for 30 years, and also oversaw the dismantling of an elderly friend's estate. She thinks exploring the Whyte gave her a chance to process her own feelings of loss. “Much of this experience was intense and personal,” she says.

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