The Painter’s Gift

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David More, “Horses Above River,” 1995

oil on linen, 30” x 30” (collection of the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery)

When David More decided to donate some of his art to the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery five years ago, his thought was nothing more than: “Here’s some stuff.” That stuff turned into 190 paintings, drawings and sketchbooks of outstanding quality and significance. 

Now, the Central Alberta gallery is expressing its gratitude by displaying some 50 of those works in The Painter’s Gift, on view until Jan. 1. The real delight of this show, besides More’s revered landscapes, is seeing the unexpected directions this Alberta artist has taken in a career that spans some five decades. 

If you think such a gift might consist of unsuccessful leftovers – forget it. As More says: “The stuff that sells tends to be safe.” The works that remain in an artist’s collection over the years are often the most interesting. They may deviate from the predictability required by the marketplace, represent a fascinating authenticity, or simply be pieces the artist treasures. 

“You hold stuff back,” says More, describing how certain works trace the direction his thinking was heading. Such pieces can have – as they do here – a powerful instinctual quality.

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David More, “Harvest Forms, Red Deer River Valley,” 1986

oil on canvas, 40” x 60” (collection of the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery)

Both the gift and the exhibition were curated by Mary-Beth Laviolette, a writer and curator based in Canmore, Alta. The show works well as both a retrospective and as an inside look into previously unseen approaches by More, who was born in Scotland in 1947 and raised in Red Deer. He graduated in 1972 from what was then the Alberta College of Art in Calgary and was an art instructor at Red Deer College until his retirement in 2014.

Laviolette, who wrote the 2005 book, Alberta Art Chronicle: Adventures in Recent and Contemporary Art, calls More “one of the really outstanding landscape artists in the country,” while noting that the art world has turned away from landscapes by white male artists. 

The best examples of his deeper, more personal, explorations are three colourful mixed-media pieces associated with The Garden Series, a life-long project he started in Brazil in 1975. The most interesting works in the show, they have never been exhibited before.

“The Garden Series began as a search for imaginary havens, refuges from personal turmoil,”  says More.

Garden Passage XII, XIII and XI have a strong abstract quality, in contrast with the careful geometry and reliable space and scale of better-known works in the series. These three pieces feature flattened space, along with suggestive but oddly non-objective garden-related forms that trigger a mesmerizing sense of immediacy. 

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David More, “Canadian Window I – Seven Women and The Sea – Yvette & Judy & Sue & Marie & Colette & Agathe,” 2014

oil and acrylic on canvas, 66” x 100” (collection of the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery)

A similar tendency toward flattened abstraction is apparent in a work from the Canadian Window series, exhibited here for the first time. I see this tendency to flatness as a latent gift, something vital that continued to intrigue the artist but never captured market-driven interest. Interestingly, the exquisite drawing in this series shows none of this flattening, despite its delicious sensitivity. 

As More says, the show “really pins down” major directions in his career. Examples from his well-known Forest Fade to Silent series show changes due to acid rain that More saw in the New Brunswick landscape over the years. These paintings integrate radical, acidic colour and eerie light into a beauty that both depends on and is at odds with the Canadian landscape tradition. “An awful truth began to seep into my mind,” More says. “I was witnessing a death. I was painting the end.”

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David More, “Figure on the Shore,” 2010

oil on canvas, 24” x 40” (collection of the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery)

In more recent landscapes, like the splendid Sky Forms, More’s deceptively subtle composition and brilliant under-painting take the stage in a big way – this is drama on the high prairies. Other cheery works show the beautiful garden of his rural home in Benalto, a hamlet west of Red Deer. ■

Dave More: A Painter’s Gift is on view from Oct. 12, 2019 to Jan. 1, 2020 at the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery. More’s show, Hidden Within, is on view at the Edge Gallery in Calgary from Oct. 26 to Nov. 23, 2019.

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