Everybody loves it when the carnival comes to town. That must be the theory behind the newest exhibit at Profiles Gallery.
Fun House, opening tomorrow, is a team effort from Jack Jensen, Ross Lynem, Paul Murasko and George Tosczak. Just like the title says, you’re meant to have a lot of fun, so sit back, buckle yourself in and enjoy the ride.
Lynem, a Calgary-based watercolour painter, makes some decent organic landscapes. The houses and other structures in his images seem pretty organic too. He spent 30 years as an operations supervisor in the TV industry but got the opportunity a few years ago to put down his clipboard for good and pick up a palette. In his first interview as a full-time artist, he confessed that he’s just living his dream.
“I’d always been painting and doing artwork. When I retired I went to Europe for a month and toured the art galleries. I went to see van Gogh’s work in Amsterdam. [My wife] phoned me when I was over there and said, ‘There’s studio space in an art gallery. Are you interested?’ I said, ‘Yeah! Of course!’ So I got the studio space and moved in. It worked out well. A studio in an art gallery is just so good when customers come through. Potential clients.”
That has paid off well for him and viewers should enjoy his light and bubbly scenes too.
Murasko, like Lynem, has a lot of fun as well but goes on a different tangent. His selection is a presentation of his own photographs that he has painted over with photo oil. He started by going to various carnivals to take pictures of whatever caught his whimsy. Dracula 2000, for example, shows a standing train on a funhouse ride. The vampire on the back of each car has his cape spread out in a typical fashion but the eyes look like they belong on a cat or a snake. With the colours he has used, the whole thing comes off like a somewhat disturbing colourized black and white movie.
It’s the same kind of visual style that he brought to Profiles last summer for the group show Signs and it works well. He says he is just trying to spark the viewer’s imagination.
“I like photography because of the immediacy of it,” he stated. “I can react instantly to it. It’s the hand painting that comes in after that gives me a second interpretation sometimes. A lot of people have said that the work is very nostalgic. It reminds them of something. I can understand that but that’s not something I want – for my work to always be known as nostalgic. Certain images, even from nursery rhymes and stories, those kinds of things get imprinted in us when we’re young. As we get older those things come back to us and remind us of these little things that we learned when we were kids, like vampires, Frankenstein, amusement park rides, Halloween …”
Jensen and Tosczak, the other contributors to this show, are equally interesting. The latter is an accomplished and prolific painter who loves the large-scale landscape. Jensen, on the other hand, is a novel and wry commentator whose work provides most of the exhibit’s humour. His panel cartoons come off like comic page entries like Bizarro or The Far Side but with his own take on the world. This could be his launching pad into the world of newspaper syndication but they fit extremely well within the context of an art show called Fun House.
