ROBERT ACHTEMICHUK
Artist’s paintings illuminate the wonders of the night.
FROM THE STOOP in his backyard in an old Kitchener neighbourhood, Robert Achtemichuk can see a light shining through a window in his neighbour’s garage.
Sitting in darkness, most people would take their break, glance around and return inside where things are more defined.
But Achtemichuk, 66, an artist, sees more in the dark than many of us see in the light.
His paintings hint of possibilities and the lives lived behind those windows.
Crows bobbing on wind-whipped branches of tall maples, dark trees silhouetted against snow-topped roofs; a glowing street light; >>
>> wisps of cloud in a dusky sky – nothing escapes his notice.
And then there’s the moon – usually full, occasionally a crescent, always translucent in his paintings’ dark skies.
There’s a hush about his nighttime paintings.
Achtemichuk collects these images and stores them in his memory, painting them on small canvases.
“I’ve always liked small. It’s intimate,” he says.
For the last 10 years or so, Achtemichuk’s inspiration has been the mostly nocturnal view from the backyard or second-floor window of his brown-and-white brick house on Louisa Street near downtown Kitchener.
He started to see “the trees, the light, the moon” when his family sent him outside at night to smoke. (He has since quit.)
Follow Achtemichuk as he steps out of his crowded basement studio, and you will see a backyard with fresh eyes.
You’ll also notice he doesn’t have to bend despite his six-foot height. The basement’s high ceilings were a big selling point when he, his wife and young son looked at the house 26 years ago.
“I bought the house so I could walk in the basement without leaning over,” he says, smiling.
On this spring day, Achtemichuk, who also works as a gardener for four or five clients, gives a tour. A carriage is hooked to his bike to carry his tools.
In his yard, there’s the 25-foot Scots pine and five-year-old birches he planted from seeds; a weeping cedar; a small garden with tomatoes, lettuce and cucumbers, raspberries, blackberries and strawberries; and a yellow rose he started from the root of a neighbourhood bush.
“I sit here all through the seasons,” he says.
“I walk out to here, into the back alley. That’s Moore (Avenue) on that side to the south. Wellington (Street) is east. The maple is coming into bud. It’s the tallest tree you’ll see. . . . There’s a light in that corner, a street light behind the house. I’ve painted the back alley going up this way.
“The moon rises over there,” he says, pointing.
The backyard is a bigger world than most of us take time to contemplate. “All of us are moving too fast,” he says. “How do we slow things down?”
Achtemichuk doesn’t use photographs to help him remember these moments. He keeps a sketchbook with pictures and words describing the images and colours, and he records the date and exact time he sees them. Later, those dates and times become the titles of his paintings.
“I try to remember what that wonder is about,” he says. “If I take a picture, it doesn’t translate wonder. It’s a flat representation of fact. >>
>> “If I paint these landscapes, it’s because I want to be present,” he says. “When I experience the wonder and I’m in that moment, it’s 3-D.”
He likens the experience to a quotation from English novelist Virginia Woolf when she wrote about the meaning of life: “. . . there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”
After seeing his paintings, “I would like people to walk away realizing that they can find slow moments in their life that they can appreciate,” Achtemichuk says.
He’s pleased that an exhibition of his work called Outskirts at Cambridge Libraries and Galleries earlier this year sold nine paintings and he’s looking forward to more venues.
The name Outskirts is a nod to physical and mental geography.
“My back alley view opens mostly to the southeast and includes the downtown area of King and Victoria and the view up Duke Street – so a back alley with view to city hall with railway tracks in between,” Achtemichuk writes in an artist’s statement.
“And I feel some of us like me are busy minded, what Buddhists would call monkey brain and are at Outskirts to our real selves.”
Achtemichuk’s work has been exhibited in galleries across Canada, and they’re in many private and public collections, including the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the National Library in Paris, France.
Bruce Taylor, a sculptor and University of Waterloo fine arts professor, says Achtemichuk is highly regarded as an artist.
His paintings make people stop and think and feel, he says.
“Many of them were done at night. There’s kind of a desolate sense about them and kind of a loneliness,” Taylor says.
“They’ve got a quiet sense of drama,” he says. “They’re not flashy at all. They take a little bit of patience to look at them and think about them and absorb them.”
Artist Isabella Stefanescu says the artist reminds us to appreciate the “dailyness” of life.
“He is not facile,” she says. “There’s a certain integrity that goes in that labour. He’s honest about what he sees. He doesn’t idealize or stylize it.
“I’d like people to recognize just how important he is in having us look at our environment,” Stefanescu says. “These ordinary views, we might walk past. . . .We need somebody to frame them to notice them.
“When you see Robert’s paintings, something happens to you. You see your world in another way.”
Achtemichuk grew up on a grain farm in Saskatchewan where the sky dominates the landscape, much like it does in his Louisa Street paintings.
“I roamed the hills and dales of my dad’s homestead,” he says. His high school principal in Yorkton, Sask., noticed his drawing abilities and suggested he become an artist. Engineering was another option; he liked to design airplanes.
These days, in a basement room where he has an old etching press and a table for wood cuts, he makes model airplanes from scratch, cutting pieces out of balsa wood and covering them with paper and silk. The children across the street are excited about those projects. He’s excited about fixing up his old motorcycles, a 1966 Ducati 250 and a 1985 Cagiva.
But art trumped engineering when he was a youngster.
“Winters on the farm are long, so drawing is part of it,” he says, adding his father was especially skilled at drawing horses in full harness. Achtemichuk read Life magazine articles about Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.
“I remember looking at pictures in front of the oil heater on the floor as a kid.”
Achtemichuk graduated with an honours bachelor of fine arts degree in printmaking from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg in 1970. “I liked the graphic things,” he says. “I like black and white. It’s stark; it defines the space. It’s simple to some degree.”
He was doing black-and-white prints “of figurative things” when he received a $4,000 Canada Council grant to study overseas for a year. He chose Paris.
Despite his “terrible” high school French – language skills which he improved years later at Conestoga College – he explored apprenticeships rather than attend University of Paris as a foreign student. A well-known printmaker was on his list of possibilities, he says, until he realized he wouldn’t be doing his own work. “He brought me into a room with three other men . . . . They were all printing his plates.” Instead, Achtemichuk landed an apprenticeship with master printer Paul Franck from whom he learned colour etching, which uses multiple plates, rollers and stencils. “When I left art school, I bought pastels and watercolours. I was ready to get into colour,” he says. Achtemichuk returned to Winnipeg from Paris, loaded down with a portfolio and heavy box of zinc plates. “That year was good for me,” he says. “I was drawing on my own and the person mentored me through the process of ideas and putting them into prints.” In his 20s, he became the first curator of the Ukrainian Cultural and Education Centre under construction then in Winnipeg. He re-learned how to speak Ukrainian. As a child with Ukrainian grandparents, he’d once been fluent.
“I helped them build the gallery, figure out what lights to buy. It was valuable research for a kid,” he says. The position was the first of several cultural administrative jobs that Achtemichuk would hold during his career. Later, his museum and gallery experience would include executive director at Open Studio, a top artist-run centre for contemporary printmaking in Toronto, Waterloo Regional Arts Council and the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery. He couldn’t afford to go to Europe to continue his art education, so he chose >>
>> an old, respected university in Mexico City. “I jumped in my truck and went there and studied 1½ years.” He completed the courses for a master’s degree in fine arts from 1973 to 1975.
He loved Mexico’s sociable people and their strong appreciation of visual arts.
“If there was a birthday on this street, in Mexico there would be a block party,” he says.
“You can stand outside a building and admire a frieze,” he says. Once, “a person stopped and talked to me about the building. He was a teller in a bank and he knew about the art. Where would you find that in Kitchener?”
He was introduced to gouache paint, opaque water-based paint which contains more pigment than watercolour.
Today, some of his paintings use gouache as a transparent wash and as a thick paint, he says. He might paint on European rag paper, on washi, a Japanese style of paper, or silk.
“All these experiences tumble together,” Achtemichuk says.
“Mexico was inspiring. It helped me go back to the Prairie farming roots. I learned about other ways of living, noticing and enjoying life.”
When he returned to Canada, he taught drawing and printmaking at the University of Manitoba’s school of art. He bought a corner store in the city’s north end, and made it his home and studio. He sold his figurative prints.
After three years, he put the store up for sale and left for Toronto where he taught at Sheridan College. In 1988, he became executive director of Open Studio. He stayed there 12 years, until 2000.
There was a housing crunch in Toronto in the late 1980s and Achtemichuk, who was married with a small son, looked at Kitchener where his wife had friends.
They bought a house and moved to Kitchener the same day as Achtemichuk began his job at Open Studio. Family life, the commute to Toronto started eating into his printmaking time.
“I still participated in group shows and made prints, but as you get older, you don’t stay up to 2 a.m.,” he says. “It started to diminish. By 2000, I kind of stopped.”
Tired of commuting, he quit his job at Open Studio and held a number of cultural administrative jobs here.
He began as business manager at Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery in 2001, later becoming executive director and staying a total of nine years.
“During that time, I became a Friday night painter, not a Sunday painter,” he says. “I’d sit at the back and smoke and look at the garden.
“I started to see that this is nice. This is cool, the trees, the light, the moon coming across the sky.”
It began an industrious period of art-making and he finished 35 paintings in eight years.
But administrative work at the Clay and Glass Gallery, which was experiencing great change and financial struggle, was stressful, though there were also high points. “I
worked with great people,” including celebrated American artist Judy Chicago, whose exhibition in 2007 smashed attendance records at the gallery. His doctor recommended a medical leave and later, he left the job in 2010. Within a year, Achtemichuk had won grants from the Ontario Arts Council and Waterloo Region Arts Fund. He started gardening for clients in summer. He taught at the Button Factory and local galleries. Over the years, Achtemichuk has taught drawing and printmaking at the University of Manitoba, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Sheridan College and Open Studio. He has also led workshops at the Banff School of Fine Arts, now the Banff Centre, and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, now NSCAD University. And he has continued painting “what I find wonderful” from the backyard. But he’s not contained there. “This is 8 a.m. and the sun beside the train station,” he says, pointing to a new painting. “If I find it cool, enlightening and inspiring, I try to grasp that energy regardless of whether it’s my backyard or not.”
Here, in his basement studio, Achtemichuk is surrounded by the familiar and inspirational – a photograph of the moon; his Cagiva motorcycle draped with a white towel; a collection of quilted vests for when the room is a chilly 10 degrees; a publication about Growing Garden Vegetables and Fruits from Seed; a bike hanging from the ceiling; a picture of Pieter Bruegel, a 16-century Dutch and Flemish renaissance painter he admires; a pile of paint tubes reflecting his love of colour; 20 brushes. “It’s simple – colours, papers, brushes.” Achtemichuk is thinking about what comes next.
He’s helping young people at the Multicultural Cinema Club learn how to tell stories using video.
He’s looking for a dealer in a commercial gallery to represent him.
He’s developing his use of greens and browns in his painting.
“I will probably like to do figurative stuff again,” he says. “I don’t know how that will happen. I’m picking up some Japanese brushes this afternoon . . . to work a little bigger.”
A comment written in the Outskirts show reception book made him pause recently.
“A young person said, ‘I love the moon, but where are the people and bicycles?’ I sort of thought she’s got something there.
“The only human content besides myself are the buildings and the lights. It’s the things we built that represent our habitat.
“It makes me think. It provides me with an opportunity to develop, to grow, to consider,” he says.
“I’m hopeful to find images that will be wondrous to me and I will be able to paint them.”
Robert Achtemichuk and his paintings will be at Art in the Yard, an annual outdoor art exhibition and sale, at the Elora Centre for the Arts on July 5 and 6.