Mystical imagery
Exhibit’s artists draw inspiration from landscapes, old artifacts
A new show is hanging at the Emma Butler Gallery on George Street West featuring Canadian artists Shawn O’hagan, Darren Whalen and Susan Paterson. The exhibition is set to open Saturday.
The works of the three artists vary in style and composition, and yet serve to complement each other quite excellently.
O’hagan, who resides in Corner Brook and holds a master of fine arts degree from the University of Waterloo, has been with the Emma Butler Gallery since it opened 30 years ago. She combines textile work — stitching on canvas — with oil painting to create abstract landscapes and sky scenes.
The inspiration for O’hagan’s work comes not only from her home in Corner Brook, but her cabin overlooking the water in Gros Morne, where she spends time sketching and stitching.
“The landscape is becoming secondary and I am becoming drawn more and more to the sky. I’m feeling almost limited by the landscape now and I feel inspired by the openness of the sky and changeability of the sky, and I think that what is going to be happening to the works, and I think they’re in transition right now, is that the landscape is going to become just the tiniest horizon. And I’m thinking that the horizon is kind of the meeting place of the everyday world and the mystical — the ‘what else there is,’” O’hagan says of her work.
O’hagan is particularly excited about the paintings in the collection that she did most recently and are most on the path she sees her work moving toward in the future. The images are her vision of the sky opening and revealing itself.
O’hagan’s work can also be found at some shops and cafes in Gros Morne and Fog Forest Gallery in Sackville, N.B.
Whalen is local to St. John’s and studied at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, part of Memorial University in Corner Brook. He enjoys hiking the East Coast Trail and draws a lot of the inspiration for the series he is currently working on from there. Whalen employs a rather uncommon painting technique of working first in acrylic and then painting oil over top of it.
Whalen’s work is composed of pale, pastel-like blues, greens and purples, causing the bits of white to appear more pronounced. The paintings have images of individuals almost super-imposed into the landscape scenes. Whalen places a focus on both the landscapes and the people in them being recognizable as to who and where they are.
“I’m basically looking for ways to incorporate the figure into the landscape in a sort of interesting way,” says Whalen.
Whalen has been with the Emma Butler Gallery for seven years.
For Paterson, of Dartmoth, N.S., this show will mark her second year with the Emma Butler Gallery.
Paterson attended Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, a school that, at the time, was known for teaching realism. There she began painting in watercolour, something she continued to do while training at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London, only returning to oil painting less than a decade ago.
“I was interested in painting things to look like things,” Paterson says.
Paterson returned to oil painting because it allows for richer blacks than watercolours, and simultaneously decided she wanted to work from life rather than photos, as she often had when using watercolours, and attended a workshop in Boston at the School for the Museum of Fine Arts on traditional Dutch still-life techniques.
Her work evokes a feeling of an earlier time, a sentiment created by both the subject and style.
Paterson explains she was “drawn to the older things.” Her home, a century house, is filled with antiques and items formerly belonging to her grandmother, things with a “richer history.”
Paterson’s work is currently on display at the Fog Forest Gallery in Sackville, N.B., and Gallery 78 in Fredericton, N.B.
The exhibition will open Saturday from 2-5 p.m. All three of the artists will be present at the opening of the show.