Inspiration from the cosmos
Painter Erik Olson became interested in the cosmos the oldfashioned way.
It involved a dusty, inexpensive old telescope and a starry night. The Calgary-born artist was living in Fernie, B.C. at the time but had just returned from a motorcycle trip through India, where he worked on a collection of paintings that were later exhibited in 2010 at Calgary’s Skew Gallery.
His portraits in India, done over six months, took on a “frenzied” and “cubist” style. When he returned to Canada he was looking for clarity for his work “and maybe just life in general.”
So one night he pointed a telescope at the moon.
“I was just really struck by how, even with just a cheap little telescope, you can really see the texture of it and three-dimensionality of it and the reality of it,” says Olson, who now lives in Dusseldorf but is back in town for the opening of the multiartist exhibition, Cosmos, at the Glenbow Museum. “It becomes very clear, just by a simple tool like that. That’s almost how it began. I thought maybe there was something there. Maybe I could approach it the way I do portraits, or any of my projects, which is that I will have an interest in a topic or a person and I’ll try and go in for a closer look. I find that when I do that, when I really start looking at the particular details of whatever my topic is, that can start generating the work. It tends to lead me to things that I couldn’t have planned beforehand. With this, I thought ‘what if I tried to do portraits of all of the major bodies in our solar system.’”
Olson painted the series and again exhibited them at Skew Gallery in 2011, where they caught the attention of Cosmos curator Mary-Beth Laviolette.
His work will be shown alongside pieces by Gwich’in artist Margaret Nazon of Tsiigehtchic, N.W.T. and Vancouver-based Gathie Falk as part of Cosmos, which opens Saturday at the Glenbow Museum. The three artists offer very different takes on the subject. Some of the work is accompanied by commentary by Robert Thirsk, a former astronaut and chancellor of the University of Calgary.
Nazon’s pieces, which she began in 2009, were inspired by images taken by the Hubble space telescope and feature colourful, intricate beadwork depicting supernovas, planets and nebulae.
In The Blue Marble, Nazon depicts a strand of human DNA entwined into the Earth, which Thirsk sees as emphasizing the “solitary oasis for intelligent life.”
Falk, the 90-year-old Winnipeg-born painter and sculptor, presents a number of pieces she did for her 2015 series Heavenly Bodies Again, which offer a more romanticized and poetic interpretation of the cosmos.
“I have thought about the topic for awhile,” says Laviolette. “I grew up in the ’60s; we had the moon landing, we had Star Trek. My father was an engineer and he was absolutely mad about outer space and especially black holes. He talked about them until the end of his life. I’m not sure many contemporary artists, like of Erik’s generation, have really
thought about it. We’ve been pretty earthbound for awhile in art.”
Olson, who offers portraits of Mars, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto and Charon, Mercury, Venus and a violently erupting quasar, among others, admits his knowledge of the cosmos was somewhat limited at first. But he became fascinated not only with the science-based observational data but also the naming of them in Greek and Roman mythology.
“There were sometimes interesting parallels between the mythological stories and these characters and the reality of the planet,” Olson says.
For instance, the weirdly shaped, “mean-looking ” moons of Mars, the god of war, are named Phobos and Deimos, which translate to fear and dread.
The planet has the most volcanic activity in the solar system, “spitting out these little pieces of Mars that travel around the universe.”
The planet Uranus has been “kicked over on its side,” with its axis tilted nearly perpendicular to the sun. The favoured scientific theory is that this was caused by some sort of cataclysmic event. In Greek mythology, Uranus is castrated by his son Cronos and his testicles thrown into the sea, which is how Aphrodite was born.
“Talk about a cataclysmic event,” Olson says. “And then Cronos is the equivalent of Saturn. The rings around Saturn are full of moons spinning around and eventually the gravity of the planet will pull those rings in and devour those moons and they will become part of the planet eventually. With Cronos the god, it was prophesied that one of his sons would kill him so he devoured his own children. I found there were these interesting parallels and you don’t really know how it came to be.”
For Olson, it brought fundamental questions about mankind’s mysterious relationship with the cosmos.
“They’ve been built into our culture in a way that almost we’re not aware of in certain ways,” he says. “Beyond that, it’s a mystery. It’s beyond knowledge but there’s something very tangible and real that I found to be very calming and unifying.
“The Earth and the moon and Mars and Venus, it’s something we can all agree upon.
“In a way, it’s like a unifying mythological and maybe even religious beacon that I found really poignant and somehow calming.”