Dundas Valley School of Art auction is April 7
Annual auction is Dundas art school’s biggest fundraiser
Susan Outlaw put some Lily of the Valley in a vase and painted them. The spring flowers with their tiny bells have such a short season that she wanted to extend their life by means of her art.
Her floral oil painting is one of many works in the Dundas Valley School of Art’s 48th annual art auction. This is the school’s biggest fundraiser of the year.
Over 1,400 paintings, sculptures, ceramics, prints, photographs, jewelry and textiles by emerging and established artists are on offer in the live and silent auctions.
This year’s live auction selection is bursting at the seams with landscapes. Here are some examples.
“Fall’s Fire” by Jan Kendrick captures a rural landscape: farm fields north of Fergus. Her loosely representational style draws attention to shape and colour.
“The fields had been cut for a couple of weeks in the fall,” she tells me. “The afternoon sun that day picked up all the autumn colours and reflected them off everything. It all seemed to be on fire.”
The ribbon-like stripes of the harvested field in the foreground lead us quickly into the composition.
To suggest the feeling of something ablaze, Kendrick paints these stripes in shades of red. Lighter tones alternate with darker ones, in colours ranging from the palest pink to a deep redbrown.
Brilliant blues enliven a serene winter landscape in Michelle Guitard’s “Chase Away My Blues.” Guitard paints the foreground with small horizontal strokes of blue complemented by yellow. The trunks of the bare trees are filled with dabs of blue, white and orange. A snow-laden pine on the right adds a contrasting shape.
The tall thin trees are lined up like a screen in the midground. This restricts our entry into the rest of the landscape and suggests a land uninhabited by humans.
Don Graves’ “Georgian Bay” captures a more dramatic landscape. He does this through the use of vibrant colours, irregular shapes, and expressive markmaking.
The rocks in the distance, for instance, are broken into rectangles filled with strokes of orange, purple and green. The three prominent evergreens are painted as short, quick strokes. The sky is filled with dabs and swirls.
Outlaw’s “The May Lily” is a still life with a strikingly bold composition.
“I decided to bump up the size of these evanescent flowers as they are so tiny and delicate,” she says. “I wanted them to be celebrated and seen for their incredible design and beauty.”
The flowers and their container dominate the space, but they are pushed to one side of the painting. Outlaw depicts them larger than life, but she crops them. And the striking white of the flowers and the container contrast sharply with the black background.
A white cloth lies against a black background in Marsha Strycharz’s “Peaches and Grapes.” The rich colours of the golden red peaches and the green grapes are set off by the whiteness of the cloth.
Her lifelike still life follows a traditional arrangement in that the fruit sit on a ledge that tilts slightly toward us and continues beyond the sides of the painting.
The live auction begins at 8 p.m. next Saturday with 51 works including these under the hammer in the upstairs Loft. Silent auction bidding starts Thursday.