Alberta landscape inspires local artist

The art-going public is probably well familiar with Frances Alty-Arscott's watercolour landscapes at Art Beat Gallery. The local painter is still enthusiastic about the diversity of scenery that Alberta has to offer but she's switched media.

"The Alberta landscape offers incredible inspiration and, in this exhibition, I am exploring both the flexibility of the medium and the colour of the Alberta countryside," she wrote in her artist statement.

"I've done a lot of watercolours in the past. I've been working in acrylic for a couple of years now," she said. "The show will be of my new acrylics."

Alberta Colours is the name of the new exhibit, which opens next week.

"I love the colours I see in the Alberta landscape and the acrylic medium offers so much possibility. Acrylics can have characteristics similar to the fluidity of watercolour or the density of oil paint," Alty-Arscott said. "There will be a lot of colour, mainly fall. I really love to use the Alberta landscape as a vehicle to express my colour. It's going to be very colourful."

Audiences will relish in these bright and lively works, especially in knowing that acrylic used to be her medium of choice. This show will be a high return to form for the established presence on the local art scene. It also coincides with the 2013 Spring Gallery Walk to be held on the weekend of April 20 and 21. Eight galleries in the downtown Edmonton core will be participating. More details on that event can be found at www.gallery-walk.com.

If trekking to 124 Street is too much out of your range then you need only bide your time. Alty-Arscott will be one of the featured artists during the Art Walks at Art Beat in September. She promised more Alberta landscapes but putting together the selection is still very much a work in progress.

"We'll have to see what happens with that!" she laughed.

The apprentice becomes the master

Doris Charest is breathing a sigh of relief now that she has finished her masters studies in visual art education at the University of Alberta. She's been working on it for two-and-a-half years straight with no breaks. This all took place while she was also working as a sessional instructor in the institution's faculty of education.

Her graduation party of sorts is her upcoming show at the Société francophone des arts visuels de l'Alberta.

"I'm very satisfied! I learned a lot," she said.

Her thesis was about the fear of art.

"My students all the time they're afraid of making artwork. The brand new ones … they're awfully afraid of art and taking art classes. They come to class and they're petrified. I wrote about how to break down that fear."

She said she was able to create artwork to complement her written research, following a new method of submitting her final work in support of a master's proposal.

"The two are one in the end product," she said. "I have images of my painting as it developed as I thought through the written ideas. It's a brand new way of doing artwork. I think this is the second set of graduates that they've allowed to do this. It's called arts-based research."

She also developed more than two-dozen other pieces as part of a group project with her classmate Janet Brown.