To see the beauty for the trees

It was the first week of December when the Art Gallery of St. Albert updated its exhibition space back when the weather was still lovely, like late autumn.

Now that we’ve experienced the deepest and darkest part of the winter, there’s a new show in town and it’s meant to warm hearts and put minds at ease as if experiencing nature firsthand on a long walk through the forest.

The Woods are Lovely, Dark and Deep is the poetic name for the exhibit but it isn’t an homage to Robert Frost. It features the fauna- and flora-themed works of five local artists.

Susan Casault has been in a few of the Guilded shows at the gallery in the past. Based in Parkland County, she has been a member of the St. Albert Painters’ Guild for a few years, even though she doesn’t necessarily use up much paint in her work.

“I wouldn’t describe it as photorealism because if you see it closely, you can tell that it’s not a photo. I would call it soft realism,” she explained.

She uses coloured pencils and graphite as her media of choice, and she finds she can work them so well that sometimes people mistake her art for watercolours.

“There’s a lot of interest in coloured pencil specifically because of what you can do with such a simple medium. You can blend it almost like you’re painting because the colour is translucent.”

She makes it sound easy but that’s only because she has been at it for years and has an education in graphic design from the Alberta College of Art & Design to back her up. The scenes of pussy willows and rosehips from her acreage or the old-growth cedars of Cathedral Grove on Vancouver Island made this reviewer yearn for a shadowless groundhog to herald an early spring.

Arlene Wasylynchuk has a much larger presence in the show, mostly because some of her pieces stand eight-feet tall. They come from her Regeneration series about a birch tree from her backyard. It was diseased and had to be chopped down, only to become food for new growth in the life cycle of a forest.

“I took some of the material to the studio because it was just so beautiful,” she said, adding she used parts of the tree to make her marks on sheets of Lexan. She waters down her acrylics, giving the paint a bit of unpredictability as it ends with more of a ghostly expressionism on the clear and tough pieces of plastic.

Like Casault, Wasylynchuk has an appreciation for translucence but here the see-through quality of the Lexan adds more to the narrative of the painting. Considering the size of the works, she has some big stories to tell.

“I’ve always liked to paint large. I like painting where it becomes my environment. When I do bigger work, the work takes over. It’s larger than me.”

Artists Kathryn Manry, Judith Martin and Lesley Roy round out the exhibit.