STUART SLIND, "Dawn to Dusk" and MARCUS BOWCOTT, "Marking Time," January 1 — 21, 2006, Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver

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"Renaissance Sky"

Stuart Slind, "Renaissance Sky," 2005, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches.

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"Landmark"

Marcus Bowcott, "Landmark," 2005, oil on canvas, 30 x 60 inches.

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"Renaissance Sky"

Stuart Slind, "Renaissance Sky," 2005, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches.

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STUART SLIND, Dawn to Dusk and MARCUS BOWCOTT, Marking Time

Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver

January 1 — 21, 2006

By Ann Rosenberg

Two solo shows at Bau-Xi Gallery — Stuart Slind: Dawn to Dusk, and Marcus Bowcott: Marking Time — embody entirely different approaches to the subject of landscape. In the main gallery, the oil paintings in Slind's Dawn to Dusk seek to capture (often without visible brushstrokes) the ideal beauty of a scene illuminated by a moment of light. Upstairs, Bowcott's oils-on-canvas depict coastal scenes in which the artist has lived and worked.

In Slind's imagery, there is a conscious striving for otherworldliness, ambiguity, and anonymity. His pines rendered in silhouette, like his groves of deciduous trees beside rivers or roads, could equally be locales in the Fraser Valley or the British Isles. Gainsborough-style landscapes come to mind and we look in vain for a country squire, musket at his side, with a brace of pheasants in hand and hounds at his feet. The cumulus clouds that billow high overhead seem to anticipate a flurry of trumpeting angels or the hand of God bursting through the glory. In a sense, Slind's paintings are anachronisms that seduce by their beauty of surface — an influence of Peterborough artist David Bierk [1944 - 2002] who was a master technician at refreshing important moments from eighteenth- and nineteenth- century art history. Except in a few cases where the oil under-painting has been vigorously (and noticeably) scrubbed before the over-glazing was applied, Slind's images glimmer in their formal black frames like reflections on ponds.

By contrast, Marcus Bowcott's paintings in the upstairs gallery are firmly grounded in reality. In many paintings the imagery arises from the artist's familiarity with southern British Columbia's rain-soaked inter-tidal flats and the evidence of man-made relics — the extensions of ourselves — he finds there. His finely brushed, unframedLandmark features a double-disk baffle structure (said to be used for radar deflection) under a blue sky punctuated with fluffy, powder puff clouds that stretch on forever. It is very different in many respects from Slind's Renaissance Sky, but most particularly in its sense of place.

Several other canvases in Marking Time pertain to the seventeen years Bowcott worked on BC's coastal and harbour tugboats. His job brought him into close contact with the sculptural forms of giant tanker ships and the lights of shorelines at night. Although his paintings are relatively small, he is nevertheless able to communicate the vastness of his subjects. Night waters have seldom seemed so dark or deep. Reminiscent of Whistler's 'nocturnes,' Bowcott uses visible brush strokes to depict iconic objects with impressionistic accuracy. However, there is nothing derivative or pretty about Bowcott's nightscapes. They have been born out of a deck-worker's respect for the ever-present dangers of the sea.