Vanishing Prairie Stories

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Debbie Wozniak-Bonk, "The Fire at Lake Margarite," 2017

acrylic on canvas, 15" x 30"

Regina artist Debbie Wozniak-Bonk painted woodland scenes for years before turning her attention to abandoned farmhouses and grain elevators. The struggle to make such well-trodden subjects feel fresh stretched her as an artist and allowed her to reflect on her own story of growing up on a family farm that has succumbed, like countless others, to the wave of industrial farming that's destroying the material history of an earlier era of Saskatchewan agriculture.

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Debbie Wozniak-Bonk, "Sit by the Fire," 2017

acrylic on canvas, 20" x 10"

Her show, Light Within, at Regina’s Assiniboia Gallery until Dec. 8, has a strong narrative sensibility and a magical, yet somewhat naïve quality. Executed in a series of thin glazes, her paintings glow with an almost ethereal light but also make one think of drawings made with coloured pencils. “My style is a little bit like a fairy tale,” says Wozniak-Bonk. “It’s a little bit off, a little bit unsettling.”

There's a sense of nostalgia, but she also acknowledges feeling anger. Some images show a burning farmhouse. Painting the flames, she says, was "quite therapeutic.” She often works with  colours popular in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, recalling how her father would talk about that era as the best years for farming. “You could have a small farm and make a living and provide for your family and not be too hard on the environment,” she says.

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Debbie Wozniak-Bonk, "Rage #3," 2017

acrylic on birch, 9" x 12"

Things started to shift in the ’80s as more people moved to cities and family farms were consolidated into massive parcels that could be efficiently harvested with high-tech mega-combines. The old wooden grain elevators started to disappear too, replaced by huge structures that resemble factories. Wozniak-Bonk honours their passing in The Best Years of Farming 1, which shows a derelict elevator, weathered yet rosy, positioned full frontal in the picture plane in an oddly flat perspective. Standing before a field of canola, under an impossibly blue prairie sky, nary a cloud in sight, it becomes a surreal vision of an agrarian past.

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Debbie Wozniak-Bonk, "The Best Years of Farming 1," 2017

acrylic on birch, 36" x 24"

At times, you can spot the influence of some of this continent's great realists: American Andrew Wyeth and Canadian Alex Colville, among them. There’s also a kinship with prairie painter William Kurelek.

For Wozniak-Bonk, process – all those painstaking layers and the details she creates with small brushes – is important. “It’s very meditative and contemplative,” she says. “It expands my consciousness. It really awakens me in so many ways.” As she paints, she ponders symbols like open doors, empty rooms and the reflections in windows, as well as her own memories. She muses about how we live disconnected from nature, and wonders how the world can continue to sustain us.

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Debbie Wozniak-Bonk, "Green Room,", 2017

acrylic on canvas, 16" x 20"

The mouldering farmhouses she paints – like Green Room with its sea-foam walls and missing floorboards – are getting harder to find. Farmers are burning them as they clear more land, following the ruthless economics of large-scale farming. When you drive through the Prairies you sometimes see one little building or maybe a special tree amid vast fields. “You know that was once a family farm and it’s gone,” she says. “And that story is gone.”