From Alberta to Spain

By Gilbert Bouchard

Be it Walking After Midnight or Making It Up As They Go Along, Agnes Bugera Gallery Artists Are Twisting Landscape Painting in Exciting New Directions

When most people think of landscape painting, sun-drenched scenes of forests or open fields jump quickly to mind. Edmonton artist Gordon Harper wants to change that attitude a tad and get Edmonton art fans to consider the dark side of landscape painting. This 35-year-old painter specializes in nocturnal urban landscapes, most feature homes and street scenes familiar to him from his long, nighttime walks through established, tree-lined Edmonton neighbourhoods like Belgravia, MacKernan and Old Strathcona. “Once your eyes adjust to the dark, you realize that while they are more subtle, the colours of the night are wonderfully brilliant,” he says, adding that rich, deep nighttime shadows also give nocturnal paintings a wonderful depth of mystery. His most recent body of work entitled Ghost Lake features a row of houses and trees that were recently torn down to make way for the Southside LRT extension in MacKernan. Another Agnes Bugera Gallery landscape painter who eschews easy contemporary Canadian landscape tropes is David Edwards. Best known for deeply atmospheric work reminiscent of canonic English painter Joseph Turner, an Edwards painting was featured on Nickelback’s The Long Road CD. A lifelong lover of the landscape form who paints high veracity work from photographs, Edwards strives to skirt strict, full-on realism for more “symbolic” vistas. “I don’t want to paint just one particular landscape, I want to paint a landscape that we all can identify with on a more universal Level.” David Edwards’ Land Forms exhibit is showing at the Agnes Bugera Gallery from March 10th to 22nd, while Gordon Harper’s Ghost Lake show is on display from March 24th to April 5th.

From Badlands to 17th Century Spain: Scott Gallery’s Artists Leslie Poole and Jim Davies Get Around

Internationally acclaimed painter Leslie Poole is having a four-century, two-continent-spanning conversation about art with his brand-new series of multimedia work at the Scott Gallery.

After two recent trips to Spain, the iconic Vancouver-based artist was so inspired by his viewings of “Las Meninas,” the 17th century portrait by the canonic Diego Velázquez (a large painting depicting family and court members of King Philip IV), as well as a large series of late 50s riffs of the work by Pablo Picasso, Poole just know he had to paint his own contemporary, Canadian response. “Just like Picasso did, I’ve done both large-scale, major paintings that include the whole group as well as smaller portraits of details form the original painting,” he says.

“Because I’m commenting on two very different painters — the very controlled and intellectual Velázquez and the much looser and expressionist Picasso — I can combine their different approaches.” This long-term artistic response to these two other artists also allows Poole to make a comment about the need for modern artists and art fans to “throw themselves bodily” into the observation and contemplation of historic art pieces.

While Jim Davies didn’t have to go as far to find the subject matter of his most recent painting exhibit, he’s also returning to a beloved painterly trope in search of artistic purity.

“I’ve been going down to the badlands east of Red Deer and around Drumheller for the past 20 years now and find that this part of the world really can hold my interest,” he says. “It’s a pure, untouched landscape that I structurally have to paint, in part because you’re not going to be distracted by a clump of trees or a bunch of buildings. What you do have is these wonderful forms that overlap each other. You need to teach yourself how to read and depict these forms.”

Davies, who offers courses through the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Extension in the communities abutting the badlands, often finds himself painting the landscape at odd times before or after his workday, which explains his “Twilight on the Prairie” theme for his exhibit.

Jim Davies’ show is on display at the Scott Gallery March 3rd to the 20th, while Leslie Poole’s work is on the walls from March 24th to April 10th.

Gilbert A. Bouchard is a Edmonton-based freelance journalist, cultural correspondent and broadcaster. For the past seven years, Bouchard has covered visual arts for a variety of publications including CBC Radio, the Globe and Mail, Canadian Art Magazine and the Edmonton Journal.