Inspired by industry
A Q&A with recent New Glasgow NSCAD Artist in Residence Curtis Botham
Curtis Botham, a recent New Glasgow NSCAD Artist in Residence, will be displaying some of the artwork he worked on during his time in Pictou County at the Studio Lab Gallery and hopes that some local residents will have a look.
Titled Effluence, the large-scale drawings reflect a bit of the industrial heritage of Nova Scotia with a particular emphasis on coal mining, steel and lumber.
The drawings will be on display from Nov. 2 to Nov. 30 at the Studio Lab Gallery at 199 Provost St. in New Glasgow, with an opening reception on Nov. 2 from 7 to 9 p.m. The artist will also give a talk on his work on Nov. 3 at 5 p.m. at the gallery.
Botham took some time this week to share a bit more about his experience and what this exhibit will include. Here’s what he had to say.
Q : What sparked your interest in art? A: My earliest memories involved wanting to draw cartoon characters from movies. Around ages three to six, I had this habit of watching certain movies on tape, pausing the movie at a certain point and trying my best to draw what I saw on-screen. I used the Pink Elephant sequence from Dumbo, the opening of The Nightmare Before Christmas and the monster sequence from “Halloween is Grinch Night” in particular. I was really attracted to the visuals of those scenes and wanted to be able to replicate them.
Later, I would do similar stuff with anime and manga. Later on, I got really interested in doing photo-realistic portraits (and portraiture in general), which is what got me accepted to NSCAD and ended up getting me some attention. But NSCAD taught me how to actually observe things and draw from life, rather than constantly using still images as a reference. We used live models and were encouraged to learn gesture drawing, sight measuring, linear perspective ... and this is what really cemented my skill.
My subject matter came from whatever happened to interest me at the time.
But what really allowed me to pursue a full-time art career were the grants and awards. I got the Nova Scotia Talent Trust grant a few times, won the Charlotte Wilson-Hammond Award and also got the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. The funding I got through those are what allowed me to dedicate the past year to my artistic development, and I truly wouldn’t have made it this far if it wasn’t for those organizations.
Q : How would you describe the style of art you do? A: The roughly-hewn, crude, and layered approach that I take with my largest drawings is the result of a lot of badgering from my university professors, actually! I had this tendency to smooth everything over, strive for photo-realism, and “overwork” my drawings. Art professors often try to take you out of your comfort zone, and for me, that meant making drawings that had a roughness to them. On the other hand, I am still drawn to trying to accurately capture what I see in front of me, so for many of my drawings, I still try to make it look as trueto-life as I can. So I gravitate between the two extremes of rough, messy and chaotic on the one hand, and technicallyrefined and immersive on the other. My work is usually quite big, in the tradition of history painting, and always in black and white because I prefer working with tone rather than colour.
Q : What inspires you? A: Pretty much everything! I tend to fluctuate from what inspires me at a given time. But in the case of the work that’s being shown at the Studio Lab Gallery, that style and the industrial motifs were inspired by artists like Bernd and Hilla Becher, Anslem Kiefer, Edward Hopper’s charcoal studies, Sue Coe’s slaughterhouse series and books like “The Mill, Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest” by Joan Baxter, or The Ivany Report from 2014. I’m also inspired by the experience of exploring and seeing things such as generating stations, pulp mills, clear-cut forests, abandoned steel foundries, and coal mines. The early stages of any work that I do often involves on-site studies of the places that attract me.
Q : What will you be displaying at this exhibit? A: All of the drawings on display are the result of my oneyear residency in New Glasgow. They are large-scale charcoal drawings that will depict aspects of the coal, lumber and steel industry in Nova Scotia, particularly Pictou County. The work also alludes to the effect that these industries have had on their respective communities and the controversy and debate that often swirls around them. The Northern Pulp Mill, Maritime Steel, the Pioneer Coal Mine, and the Trenton Generating Station feature in some of the drawings.
Q : What do you hope to convey to people looking at your work?
A: Many of the drawings, especially the largest ones, focus on this idea that rural Nova Scotia (and the rest of the world) is currently at a crossroads between economy and environment. They also speak to the effect that economic/population decline is having on certain areas and industries, and ask how to best overcome those dilemmas. Some of the drawings also have political slogans and talking points covering them — some in support of one side, some in support of another. Other drawings simply depict certain areas exactly as they are, leaving the viewer to form their own opinions. Obviously, people who walk into the exhibition will be bringing their own biases and connotations with them, but the hope is that the use of conflicting slogans helps people broaden their opinion, or, at the very least, discourages the idea that the opposing side is an enemy to be defeated, or silenced. Because I am in the process of forming opinions about things like “economy versus environment” and learning about things like environmental racism, I want the artwork to raise questions, rather than answer them.
Q : What’s next? A: Thanks to Arts Nova Scotia and other grants, I’ll be able to fund my art-making for another year at least! Right now I’m interested in urban environments and a lot of modernist social critique from the 20th century, so I’ll be moving into Halifax or Dartmouth in order to make artwork about that. I also have a series of exhibitions coming up — the one at the Studio Lab Gallery is first, then I have one in Halifax’s Corridor Gallery in January, and a third one at the Craig Gallery in Dartmouth in April. So until April, I will continue to work on my “Effluence” series to prepare for those shows. I’m not sure exactly what new drawings I’ll make, but I want to make a drawing about the Westray disaster as well as a drawing of the new Donkin Coal Mine in Cape Breton.