There’s a sense of calm and wonder that comes over you when you’re looking at one of Mike Dendy’s landscape paintings. You’re not just getting lost in the beauty of the natural world through the artist’s brushstrokes. You’re learning about the impact of colour courtesy of a painter who calls himself a colourist.
“I’m interested in colour. They’re just colour statements when you come right down to it. I figure why not abandon all realistic kinds of references and just do colour statements. Colour is the most important part of my paintings,” he stated.
Dendy is not one of those devotees of photorealism. The former high school art and photography teacher does sing the praises of cameras (“I bless digital photography all the time,” he says) but he much prefers to infuse his work with an Impressionist’s sensibility, one that makes you realize why painting became important in the first place: it allows you to stare at a beautiful and unchanging scene.
And all of it follows from his love of colour, even admitting that he had his own ‘Blue Period.’
“I went through a stage when I was painting blue and so I did winter scenes. I just tried to experience blue, tried to do something with blue to make it as interesting as possible.”
Looking at the work in this series, you’ll see wintry scenes with so much blue in the snow that it makes you shiver and sparkling rivers that make you want to just dive right in. The trees cast serene blue shadows on the snow, reminding the viewer of those brief moments of walking down a wintry path, peaceful and quiet, and the only thing that’s moving is a squirrel or a bird or a branch.
That’s the power of colour. It’s amazing to think that he is only eight years into his personal practice, after almost 40 years of teaching it. The two activities are mutually exclusive, he explained, because they require so much of yourself. While he was teaching, he just didn’t have the time to paint.
“I didn’t have enough energy to do artwork. If you want to do it right it’s going to eat you up,” he admitted, adding that he was “happy, surprised and flattered” to be named the Artist of the Month. “When I retired, I decided I would take up painting. I took up landscape painting because I’d never done it.”
Now, he paints practically every day and is also a member St. Albert Painters’ Guild. Perhaps he finds himself so busy to get around to things like having a website or a blog like so many other artists but it’s not because he’s secretive. He’s just not a big self-promoter. Let the work speak for itself is his motto. And it does.
Then again, he doesn’t really put himself in the same category either.
“I don’t really think of myself as an artist so much as someone who does art.”
Dendy does keep active in the community, though. He last showed through Painters’ Guild’s fall show in October, about the same time his work was accepted into the Art Gallery of St. Albert’s Art Rental and Sales Gallery as well. He is also represented by the Daffodil Gallery in Edmonton.
