Gallery 7 at the Bookstore has a new landscape exhibit from three established artists from the St. Albert Painters' Guild.
Peg McPherson, Val Solash and Louise Piquette are featured in the exhibit, which runs until Sept. 29.
McPherson brings a series that she calls "meditative," acrylic works that show her takes on scenes from places such as Whistler and Slave Lake. While they are definitely representational, don't go so far as to call them realistic. One in particular has such vivid and vibrant oranges that one might wonder if the artist had on orange-coloured glasses.
"Almost!" she joked, pointing to one painting that she said was inspired by a particular verdant landscape near Cochrane. "I would stare at it all day. I painted from 10 in the morning 'til one (in the morning). I would stare at it … and see different shades of greens. I thought, 'I want to interpret it as an artist.' The kind of energy it gave me looking at that … it just inspired me to do something more energetic than the green."
She shied away from calling it a full Fauvist approach to that specific work but did confess that she employed a fair bit of artistic license. The tactic is effective and striking.
"It's an artist's job to interpret and to alter and change things," Solash reinforced.
For her part, Solash prefers to call her series 'Odds and Sods.' It features some dramatic oil and monotype perspectives on scenes from around Whitemud Creek.
"It's like a series … but not one series. It's eclectic!" she laughed.
Her wall at the space is densely packed. The prolific artist was relieved to have the show, if only for what it afforded to her home studio area.
"I paint every week. One of the problems with painting a lot and not being a professional is that you acquire a lot of paintings!"
Plamondon's Piquette is the one watercolour artist in this exhibit. The avowed nature lover explained that she and her husband frequently go camping and canoeing on a nearby lake "where motorboats don't go." She veers away from photography in order to capture her pristine, inviting scenes of the water and the boreal forests.
"It's so inspiring and peaceful. I'm just there for that total experience," she said, admitting her source material relies heavily on artistic license. "It's purely out of my imagination. That's why God gave me this creative mind. That's why we have this memory of ours, this brain. You store stuff. It's not exact but it's there."
The Bookstore is located at 7 Perron Street.
A golden plate for a steel-legged rider
The Tour of Alberta hit Sherwood Park on Saturday and the winner of stage four took home a special souvenir of the moment, courtesy of Redwater sculptor, potter and ceramicist Brenda Danbrook, a frequent exhibitor at the St. Albert Farmers' Market.
She created a large 18-inch oval plate out of Alberta stoneware clay with a silk-screened image from the tour on the front, framed by an 18-karat gold lustre band that gives a rather fitting symbolism.
"I pulled out the glitz for this piece!" she exclaimed with a hearty laugh.
"They did give me some artistic license which was nice. I said, 'I think that to make the rim really thick and for it to look like the tire, and then having the rim of the wheel banded in gold. I put the spokes for the bike on the back of the plate.' It was really fun, I have to tell you."
She got the "pretty cool" commission due, in part, to the publicity surrounding her recent show at the Alberta Craft Council. The artist didn't otherwise know much about the competition. "It's kind of like the Tour de France … except that it's the Tour of Alberta!"
"It's enriching. It's fabulous. I'm so excited about it! To be a market potter, I get this reward of making functional dishes in everybody's lives. And then I get to take the education that I learned from Red Deer College and the Alberta College of Art and Design and use that to make an object that's going to go down in history. It's very rewarding!"
The five-stage race ended in Edmonton on Sunday. It covered hundreds of kilometres through several communities including Calgary, Lethbridge and Red Deer.
