VASA ends ArtWalk season with harvest of summery paintings

If you’re mourning the end of August and mentally preparing yourself for the gradual environmental decline into another prairie winter, then stopping in at the VASA Gallery on Perron Street will likely perk you right up. There, you can look at paintings of cows or abstract landscapes — including some famous Alberta scenes — that stretch the imagination and warm the soul at the same time.

There probably isn’t a more comforting way for gallery-philes to close out the ArtWalk season either. The Visual Arts Studio Association got all of its Perron Street resident artists together for this cornucopia of new selections.

You can thank Diane Way for the bovine influence. She spent some time this year participating in one of the province’s great pastimes: driving along the rural roads to see the sights of the countryside. The result was that she developed a real affinity for these cud-chewing animals and all of their personality characteristics.

“My husband has a sports car and he likes to go downtown and drive around. I said, ‘No, let’s go drive around out in the country.’ You can smell the manure and everything. It’s a great smell! It brings you back to reality,” she admitted. “I’d rather smell that than car exhaust.”

The result is what she calls her Cow series, although there’s one painting that only has the barn buildings in it. This is a bit of a departure from her previous watercolours that veer closer to realism than expressionistic.

She explained that she’s always trying to grow as an artist, especially since photographs just don’t do justice to the feelings or the emotions of what you see. She says that’s what paintings are for.

“I’m trying to capture more of the atmosphere that I felt when I saw the scene. It was kind of a late afternoon and the sun was beating down and hitting the backs of their hides. I just thought that this was really special.”

“I’m trying to do that more in my work. I’m trying to get more atmosphere into my paintings, more of a blend of realism and ambience.”

She’s in good company for this eclectic show with eight exhibiting artists including Bruce Allen, Doug Fraser, Frank van Veen, Miles Constable, Monk, Bruce Thompson and Pat Wagensveld.

Fraser had a few pieces held over from his show from last month, but van Veen looks like he’s on a new tangent as well. His geometric landscapes show some sharp angular trees at the Clifford E. Lee Sanctuary and at Spirit Island near Jasper. These forests look like you would be taking your life in your hands if you ventured too close to the branches.

Then there’s Wagensveld’s Prairie Landscape in the front display window. Its barren forest and murky green ground would otherwise be foreboding. It’s only the sparse but gorgeous sunset that gives the viewer a glimpse into how beautiful this landscape really is in the land of the big sky.

I also really enjoyed Allen’s Good Ole ’43 289’, possibly an overly sentimental tribute to a truck, complete with wide brushstrokes to really lay the paint — and the emotion — on thick.