It might not be the most compelling title ever heard for an exhibit, but there is a lot of depth to look into within the works themselves.
Of Local Interest is the latest exhibit at Art Beat. A combined effort from well-known St. Albert painters Doris Charest and Bev Bunker, it’s a loving homage to the diversity of the Alberta landscape and at the same time, it’s also a tribute to the talent of the artists themselves.
While Bunker prefers the straight up picturesque landscape based on the reality of the scene itself, Charest’s works are slightly more obtuse but in a good way. Frankly you might not even recognize her abstract works as based on actual landscapes if they didn’t have trees in them. Charest rarely disappoints and audiences love her. Her artistic sensibility, her openness to paint skilfully but with ease, is matched only by her range of expression.
Bunker has stuck to more traditional scenes but still shows signs of growth as an artist. I loved her warm palette this time around but what really struck me is how well she captures depth of perspective in some compelling situations. One image of hoodoos in the Badlands shows sandy rock in front of sandy rock but somehow she manages to make my eye see the distance between the two. Another painting of a series of birch trees amplified this effect 10 times.
She said that this is the result of a slightly new approach to her work, one that was borne out of choice but tempered with some of her own harsh self-criticism.
“I had figurative narratives before and I just thought that I had to explore something different that I hadn’t done,” she said, talking about how she had one idea for this show that she stopped, to work on what eventually became what is now on display. “To be quite honest I was painting something that was so familiar to me. There was a point that I just said, ‘This is boring me. My own paintings are boring me.’ And so I bought some more tubes of different colours, changed my palette and wow, I just started to fly. I just realized this is what I needed to do.”
It’s amazing how something so simple like bringing in some other colours can take your work to a different level.
“Painting somehow has broken into a new direction. When you paint you go through these transitions and they’re frustrating,” she laughed. “I’ve been going through this transition for about the past six months and wanting to have my work become looser and more colourful but not get a sense that I’m going crazy and wild. The vibrancy of colour is what really pushed me.”
