The change agent
Duncan de Kergommeaux has never stopped shifting the shapes on his canvases
If Duncan de Kergommeaux was a much younger man I’d suspect him of being disingenuous, but at age 86, who has time for spin? I believe him when he says, “I guess I’m lucky that I’ve never discovered what art was.”
We’re standing in Wallack Galleries on Bank Street, which to Nov. 30 is showing the latest works by de Kergommeaux, 60 years after the B.C.-born artist moved to Ottawa. (He’s left Ottawa for spells of a year or two at a time, to work and study in London, Ont., or Paris, or New York, and now lives in Chelsea.) He’s had more than 50 solo shows over the decades, and taught art across Canada. His works are collected by the National Gallery, the Ottawa Art Gallery, Carleton University Art Gallery and many further afield. And yet, he says he doesn’t know what art is?
“I actually knew what art was when I was a young man, and I could tell people what art was,” says de Kergommeaux, whose physical bearing refutes his fourscore-and-six years. “But as I started to mature and grow older, I began to understand that art is an interactive thing, something that we participate in, and you can’t go much beyond that in saying what it is.”
The interactivity of de Kergommeaux’s latest paintings is stoked by the “marks” he makes on his flat fields of colour. The marks are squiggles, really, seemingly impulsive flourishes of the brush when all else is done, a final touch to set free the viewer’s imagination.
The paintings are collected under the title Gatineau Hills, Old Irish Line, in reference to the view from his studio. What a placid place it must be, with cows munching grass beneath vast, blue skies. The landscapes are studies in colour, in the shifting balance between blue above and green below, from the high contrast of Gatineau Hills, Old Irish Line #10 to the closer, merging hues of #7.
In all de Kergommeaux’s recent paintings the blue and green (or blue and blue, in his seascapes) are separated by a thin line of humanity, held in houses or farms or beachfront and even in ships at sea.
De Kergommeaux’s style has changed constantly over the years — change, more than anything else, is what his work has always been about — and the full abstraction of past decades has morphed into a fond consideration of that most mysterious part of any landscape, the horizon.
“They all seem to deal with the sky, the foreground and a line in the middle,” he says, as patrons begin to fill the gallery for his vernissage.
De Kergommeaux wants to plumb the horizon indefinitely, he says, “so that it suggests to people that it’s infinite, the number of possibilities that someone can generate from just a simple format.”
Hence his combination of the “simple format” with “flat colours.” It all moves the viewer, he says, “in a more poetic way into some kind of idea of what a landscape can be, what a seascape can be.”
I ask him, your art has been changing for decades, where is it taking you?
“I do not believe it is leading to some place in particular, because I believe art is truly in flux,” he says.
“In the early days I thought I could find a signature style and stick with that. I used to wish I could, like Alex Colville or something like that. But as I got deeper and deeper into the creative process, I knew that I had to keep moving.
“I’m at peace with myself. I find that the marks that I make are my marks, and that’s what I’ve been searching for all my life, so that everything you put on the canvas has some meaning to you, and is a clear reflection of how you feel. Never as clear as you want it to be, but at least honest.”
So, I say, have you truly not discovered what art is, after all these years?
“I could say yes, I have discovered what I want to say, because I flow with the poetry of making art, and responding to the environment I live in as a painter.”
Amen to that.