Paul Van Ginkel has found fame in Santa Fe
Artist Paul Van Ginkel finds his niche in competitive visual arts world
Artist Paul Van Ginkel considers it his magnum opus, the most significant work he has produced during his prolific 30-year career as a professional artist.
While it may be a bit of an exaggeration to say it took him 13 years to complete, it’s safe to say the epic, action-packed image that inspired his painting, Equine Tsunami, had galloped around his imagination for more than a decade. The 2013 oil on canvas was quickly snatched up by the Canadian Pacific for its national headquarters in Calgary not long after completion.
It depicts 161 horses crossing the Red Deer River. Van Ginkel captured the image with his camera at the climax of Stampede Trail 2000, a six-day, 220-kilometre stock drive from Hanna to Calgary to help celebrate the millennium.
He had the photo, but it was also burned into his memory. So much so that the thought of actually painting the scene became daunting.
“I was probably intimidated,” says Van Ginkel, in an interview at his Inglewood Gallery earlier this week. “Am I worthy of this? Can I actually do this? It gets branded in your consciousness. I will always remember it. So everything came together. It was time to do something monumental.”
While the painting was completed and sold four years ago, it continues to have an impact on Van Ginkel’s work and career. Not only does the experience continue to inspire new paintings — including a few new works currently on display as part of Recent Paintings, a joint exhibit with his wife, Kristin — but it nicely encapsulates the western art the painter is known for, both locally and in the competitive Santa Fe, N.M. visual arts scene. Cowboys and rugged ranch life are depicted, as is Alberta’s big-skied vistas. But it also seems to be a high-water mark for Van Ginkel’s 30-plus years of depicting the wild beauty of the equine.
He was still living in Winnipeg when he first attended the Calgary Stampede on a family vacation at the age of 10. Three years later, the Van Ginkels moved here and the fledgling artist found himself deeply inspired by cowboys, First Nations warriors and horses. In his 2015 book, The Art of Paul Van Ginkel Volume 1: A Retrospective, he includes a 1969 drawing of a First Nations warrior on horseback he drew with ballpoint pen as a child.
“So fast-forward to when I went to art school and it was time to get serious and be a professional artist. What are you going to paint? To me it was almost a no-brainer just to continue with that theme. One of the many great things about that is (Calgary) is a pretty easy market. In addition to it being a good market to show and hopefully sell the work, it’s just the access to material: all the ranches and the cowboys I’ve befriended.”
This is not to say that Van Ginkel’s work is completely dominated by western imagery. Even in this new exhibit, the artist offers other themes. Over the years, he has become known for his portraits of First Nations people. He has also specialized in portraits of Flamenco dancers, inspired by trips to Seville and Madrid.
In 2015, he went to Venice with his wife for 10 days. They shot more than 9,000 photos, which in turn inspired both to paint a series based on images from the city, mostly of the historic architecture. Kristin Van Ginkel’s watercolour paintings based on the Venice trip will also be on exhibit.
In the oil on canvas Venetian Personality, Paul Van Ginkel captures the aging face of a building, complete with old shutters, exposed bricks, rod-iron and spreading moss.
“Part of the purpose of Venice, and this is a view shared by many, is to get lost,” Van Ginkel says. “That’s when the magic happens.”
Also included in the new exhibit is One, which is part of a 1996 figurative nude series Van Ginkel did of a Russian belly dancer from Santa Fe.
But it has been the western imagery that has been Van Ginkel’s “bread and butter” for the past 30 years. He sees himself as a painter first but small business owner a “close second.” As such, his western focus has allowed him to find a business-savvy niche in Calgary and Santa Fe.
After graduating from the Alberta College of Art in Calgary in the early 1980s, he worked at the Calgary Herald as an editorial illustrator until 1989, when he left to work full time as a painter.
While greatly inspired by the Alberta landscapes and surroundings, he also ventures into Montana, Arizona and South Dakota. After winning the Best in Show award at the 1990 Calgary Stampede auction, he began showing in his own booth.
Fans of western art began telling him that he should try his luck in Santa Fe, which has been a mecca for art lovers for nearly a century. Its history as a centre for visual arts dates back to the ’20s and ’30s, when it was known for nurturing American modernists and abstract artists. But since then, the New Mexico city of fewer than 80,000 people has become the third largest art market after New York and Los Angeles with an emphasis on western and other genre art. Van Ginkel found representation by a gallery 25 years ago and has been a presence there ever since.
“That’s a destination place to go shop for art,” says Van Ginkel. “When the gallery sells my work in Santa Fe, probably 90 per cent of it leaves town because the reach is so great. In contrast, 90 per cent of the paintings I sell here stay in Calgary or go to Cochrane and Airdrie. So that’s a real contrast ... It’s very important for me to have a presence down there. Even though I do well enough here, it’s a very different market down there. I can command higher prices, for example, because it’s a different market. That aside, through Santa Fe and the sales and the exposure, I’m able to get into important collections down in the United States that I simply wouldn’t have any access to here.”