HELLO SUMMER
Summer means different things to different people. For some, nothing says summer like Port Dover.
Michael Dobson has spent a lot of time there.
“I’ve painted Port Dover more times than any other place,” he tells me. “It has happy memories for me.”
Dobson is one of the artists in Summer in the City, an exhibition of about 90 paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures at Gallery on the Bay.
The artists came up with a variety of summery subjects including urban views, interiors, still lifes, landscapes — and landscapes with water.
Dobson takes a tonalist approach in “Port Dover” — bathing the scene in darkened blues, greens and greys.
“I was painting on location at the time,” he explains. “It was peaceful, quiet, no one else was around, just before dawn.”
The boat and buildings crowding the fore- and mid-grounds form a solid horizontal mass of shapes enclosed in dark lines.
“I never tire of painting the fishing boats there,” Dobson says. “They appear to have unique characters. The boat in the painting seems to be asleep.”
The wharf posts and light standards provide verticals that encourage an upward movement to the sky with its wispy pink clouds. Dobson paints these in a looser, more animated style that contrasts with the solidity of the boat and buildings.
Chelo Sebastian, a Hamilton artist, grew up in the north of Spain. She loves the sea.
“I grew up by the sea, but at the same time I have a terrible, irrational perhaps, fear of it,” she tells me. “Once in a while I paint it, trying to get its beauty and power.”
“Shelter from the Storm” offers a spacious entry point into the sea. But rocks meet us as we move through the painting, hinting at danger in a storm. A sailing ship beyond appears to have escaped the danger.
“I used the kind of colours that you see after a storm at sea,” she says.
Sebastian builds up her composition with a variety of shapes and materials. Some, like the land and water, are painted. Some of the sails are barely there, suggested only through the lines of a pencil. The rocks and the body of the ship are collage shapes cut out of paper.
“It’s not a specific place,” Sebastian says. “But it’s based on the north of Spain: big cliffs, big waves, cool colours.”
Brianne Service, a local artist, lived in Florence and painted old European buildings and streets. She is interested in the close relationship between architecture and nature. She once told me she found depicting nature a more liberating experience than painting architecture.
In seeking a subject for some of her smaller paintings, she wholly embraced nature and took a hike out to Tew’s Falls.
In “Tew’s Waterfall,” rocks partly covered by water and a fallen tree block our way into the painting, encouraging us to
pause before entering a possibly uninhabited land. The waterfall — three ribbons of blue and white — rises dramatically in the background, leaving no room for sky.
Summer can’t be summer without birds. Trevor Hodgson offers a kind of archetypal avian in “Bird #3.”
An orange bird, resting on a thin ground line against a light blue backdrop, fills the pictorial space. Hodgson reduces the bird to a series of geometric shapes. The central body shape comprises straight lines and triangles. Rounded shapes flank the central one.
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@the spec.com Special to The Hamilton Spectator