Serious attraction to abstraction pays off
Hamilton artist’s work to appear on Magnotta wine label
Here’s a toast to Olivia Brouwer.
The Hamilton artist is the grand prize winner of Magnotta Winery’s 25th anniversary art competition.
Her painting, “Topography III,” is destined to become part of the winery’s art collection and will pop up on the label for a red wine to be released in November.
“She is the first Hamilton-based artist to be included in Magnotta’s private art collection and featured on one of our wine labels,” Marisa Mainella, director of marketing for Magnotta Winery, tells me.
Magnotta has something of a reputation for art. The winery, based in Vaughan with vineyards in Niagara and Chile, was founded 25 years ago by Rossana and the late Gabe Magnotta. From the start, the labels on all their wines carried reproductions of artworks.
The art comes from Magnotta Winery’s extensive collection, which includes pieces by Group of Seven members and established and emerging local and international artists. Magnotta herself selects a work for each label.
But this time, to celebrate the winery’s 25th birthday, Magnotta decided to host a juried competition. It was restricted to college and university students specializing in art.
“In today’s economy, fine art students have a harder struggle in the job market and I wanted to show them the value of their skills in the business world and give them a head start in their art career,” Magnotta said in a media release.
Brouwer, a University of Toronto and Sheridan College graduate, won $5,000 for “Topography III,” a big abstract.
“It was first sketched with charcoal on canvas and then painted with layers of oil paint,” she tells me.
Brouwer has a serious attraction to abstraction.
“I grew more interested in ambiguity once I started going to university,” she says.
“It took me a while to get the hang of meaningfully interpreting abstraction. ‘Topography III’ was the beginning of the realization that I could make abstraction that only I would understand the representation but it would come across as an abstraction to my audience, thus blinding the viewer.”
Sinuous, fluid shapes and lines bounce off and blend into one another. Solid and darker shapes and lines are clustered toward the top half. Lighter, less fully formed marks spill into the bottom of the composition, creating a sense of something about to change — or something unfinished.
A sense of something unfinished is a way for Brouwer, who is blind in one eye, of sharing her experience of vision loss with the viewer.
“The painting is quite large in scale and so the experience of it is much more direct and intimate when the viewer looks at it in person,” Brouwer says.
“However, despite the scale, I think it’s interesting that the painting is paired with wine, which engages a specific experience of taste that we try to figure out when consumed. My partial blindness has been a limitation for my sight and so I’ve been curious about our initial reaction to perception and the senses.”
In another one of Brouwer’s dynamic abstracts, “Inkblot No. 1,” the darker forms recall inkblots gathered in the centre and bottom of the composition. Brightly coloured areas swirl around them, challenging their bid for compositional supremacy.
This painting is on show in the Atrium of McMaster’s Innovation Park.
Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@thespec.com