A trio of local artists has given bibliophiles a new reason to mill around the Bookstore on Perron Street. Their work in the store’s back room, dubbed Gallery 7, is an engaging respite from the toils of finding the right book to wile away the lazy summer afternoons.
Peg McPherson, Bill Carstairs and Louise Piquette have all contributed selections from their very divergent oeuvres to this one show. There’s something for everybody, so long as everybody loves birds, trees or city scenes.
McPherson’s whimsical series of small canvases with bird and flower pairs marks a new phase in the painter’s career: the playful phase. She said it was sparked by morning meditations in her garden.
“I think it was good for us to have the late snow. Everything seems to have come along very nicely,” she said.
This series has been under development for the last three months, since back when we were all still hoping for an early spring, she explained. Maybe that’s where her newfound sense of humour stemmed from. Her works come with titles like Contemplation, Should I? and Choices, all leading the viewer to consider the inner dialogue of our avian friends.
“I’m having more fun with these,” she laughed. “I was always exploring new materials, new subjects, different textures … more of a serious study. I’ve wanted this to come out for a long time. I’m enjoying this.”
She said that fans should expect some larger works in this same series in the near future.
Carstairs, on the other hand, wants to take visitors to lands far, far away. He’s referring to the Caribbean and the Aegean seas, to be exact, but only so long as they’ll fit. He usually works on canvases in the ballpark of 0.9 metres by 1.2 metres, so he’ll have to make some tough decisions for the one wall that he’s allotted.
“They may or may not fit,” he considered. “I would actually prefer to hang my bigger works but if I have to go with the smaller stuff, I will.”
Whatever he comes up with will certainly be pleasing to the eye. There’s the Rose Hall of Jamaica to start. It’s a stately colonial manor with a lot of lush greenery. Then there’s The Blue Domes of Oia, a striking scene of a gorgeous locale in Santorini, an island in the Cyclades about 200 kilometres away from Greece. He was there personally during a cruise last year and adored the place from the first moment he laid eyes on it.
“It’s a lovely spot. I have about 50 photos of Santorini. It’s very photogenic,” he said.
If you can’t get enough of the Mediterranean, Carstairs hopes to also fit in a scene from Murano, Italy.
Completing the triad is Piquette, who brings a group of landscape forest scenes from Alberta’s northern boreal forest, especially near Plamondon, her second home. She loves the trees so much that she couldn’t help but get some close-ups of some branches.
“It’s gorgeous! Lakeland: it’s one lake after another,” she began, going on to describe one of her favourite spots. “It’s a valley with lots of spruce and birch. It’s heavy forest.”
She said that the real challenge wasn’t in getting her subjects to stand still in the swaying breezes. Rather, it was with her medium of choice. You could say that she’s still developing her expertise in watercolours.
“It’s really quite different. It’s a medium that a lot of people are afraid of because it’s one of the most difficult. I tend to agree. It’s a very frustrating medium. You can do a lot of things with it once you get to know what it can and can’t do.”
It seems that she can already do a lot with it and this show proves it. Her nature scenes are meditative and quite enjoyable.
