Home is where the art is
Carnegie Gallery exhibit part of art’s oldest partnership
What best conveys the idea of home? A person, a place, a thing?
The Women’s Art Association of Hamilton asked its members to create works of art exploring the idea. The result is Home, an exhibition at the Carnegie Gallery.
Women and home is the oldest partnership in art ever. Ancient Greek potters, almost 3,000 years ago, decorated their wares with visions of happy housewives. And Victorian artists — traditionalists and modernists, women and men — joyfully embraced images of women, from all social classes, enjoying life at home, often with children.
In the 20th century, some artists visualized home by painting places and things, rather than people.
The WAAH members do this too, emphasizing places and things associated with home such as landscapes with houses, rooms, parts of rooms and domestic objects.
Very few living beings inhabit these paintings. Contented cats are another matter. Rolfi, Anita Weitzman’s ginger cat, appears in “Rolfi’s Home,” a domestic still life.
Weitzman lives with Rolfi in a west Hamilton condo, a place she recently moved to from her home in Dundas.
Working in her trademark style — dynamic, loosely representational and colour-saturated — Weitzman fills her canvas with a variety of familiar objects.
In the top left, the cat, usually rambunctious, sits in a window. His name hovers in big letters above him.
“Rolfi and I have a symbiotic relationship,” Weitzman tells me. “He’s busy watching me.”
This implies her presence somewhere in our space.
The window’s shape complements the rectangles of the cupboard below it. These geometric shapes contrast with the curling, rounded forms of the flowers in the vases to the right.
The flowers in particular constitute a wonderful mass of multihued lines and lively shapes that are ready to burst out of the picture space.
Home can be where you were born and grew up. But Canada is a country of immigrants, so many Canadians have found a new home in a land far from their first home.
Danuta Niton, for instance, has made Dundas her home after immigrating to Canada from her native Poland.
Her “Home Sweet Home,” a rural landscape, looks ordered and balanced from her use of orange tones and rounded shapes throughout.
In the foreground, the pumpkins and their stems echo the two hills behind them, each topped by a single tree. All the foliage is orange, too, as are the roofs of the white buildings.
A little white house with a red roof is almost hidden by trees in “Tranquility,” by Jolanta Stanisz, who also came from Poland. Her idyllic rural landscape is characterized by bands of sinuous multicoloured hills rolling under a brilliant blue sky.
Janet Kimantas finds her idea of home in the city. In “Tree House,” a lone, scraggly tree seems to be growing out of a one-storey building. The tree is flanked by highrises, its irregular natural shape standing in sharp contrast to the humanmade architecture.
Has nature been conquered here, or is it reclaiming its home territory?
Other equally eye-catching paintings of home have been contributed by Callie Archer, Tzvia Devor, Jodie Kitto-Ward, Janet Parker, Alison Sawatzky and Sylvia Simpson, among others.