Art school auction pops up online
Computers and phones replace pencils and paddles for DVSA bidding
The Dundas Valley School of Art’s annual art auction was to be its 50th this April. But because of COVID-19 restrictions, the school’s biggest fundraiser has been postponed.
Undeterred, the DVSA is offering smaller online auctions of selected works that were submitted for the April event, which traditionally included silent and live sections.
The fourth online auction has begun. It ends at 4 p.m. Sunday, May 31. And it’s supersized, with 25 pieces instead of nine. Included are paintings, photographs and ceramics by local artists working in a variety of styles and subjects.
The sea calls to Susan Outlaw. In “Cerulean and Aqua,” she selects a wide view with its sense of infinite space. The sea dominates, taking up more than half the composition.
“My time spent along the Atlantic has been the inspiration for many of my seascape works and also some of my still life work,” she says. “This particular painting was a bit of an experiment. I wanted the sky and sand to appear as monochromatic as possible to highlight the vibrancy of the sea’s brilliant colours.”
Outlaw, who works in a lifelike style, encourages us to enter on a diagonal, starting with a triangular patch of land on the left. We move to a strip of lowlying foamy water and then encounter rising white waves that contrast with the rich darkness of the sea beyond them.
“My attraction to the sea is the power it has over my senses,” she says. “Tranquil one moment, excitable the next, the ocean is unpredictable and mirrors life in many ways.”
Guennadi Kalinine excels at landscape, the human figure and portraits. Lately he’s been horsing around; that is, his sunny and soothing rural landscapes include horses. He works in a soft-edged lifelike style enlivened with the tiniest of multicoloured dots.
In “Happy Horse,” a cluster of grasses in the foreground, painted as barely there undulating lines, leads to the horse, head bowed to munch on vegetation. What’s great here is how much blue paint Kalinine uses to depict a lifelike white horse.
The horse, he tells me, is called Artex. Kalinine says he became close to horses about four years ago when visiting some friends’ horse farm on Middletown Road.
“I always loved horses, but it was first time in my life I could spend more time with these beautiful animals and even ride them,” he says. “I see it as the greatest gift I got in my life. There’s no horse that belongs to me, but they are all mine and some of them are sure I belong to them.”
Maureen McNeil walked the woods in “Sweet Caroline.” She reduces the land to richly hued irregular shapes and streaks. The foliage of the evergreens in the foreground, for instance, comprises red and black lines enclosing jewel-blue vertical shapes. Multicoloured streaks energize the sky.
Rossana Dewey stayed home for “Fruit Tray,” a domestic still life. She arranges natural and human-made objects such as fruit and crockery on a table top that tilts toward us.
Painting in her wonderfully simplified style and harmonious colours, she draws attention to the varied shapes that play off one another. The roundness of the green apples, for example, contrasts with the rectangular bowl they sit in. The misplaced lid on the blue container in the right foreground results in a pair of criss-crossed rectangles.
Linda Blakney works in a decidedly abstract style. In “Spring,” one of her smaller pieces, she brings together brightly coloured, loosely geometric shapes. Some look more sharp-edged than others, inspiring us to imagine that some shapes are emerging, others disappearing.
Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator, YouTube video maker and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art.