open tuesday to sunday 10-5
Opening Reception Thursday August 22, 5 to 8 pm
Artist Talks Saturday August 24, 2 to 4 pm
“Losing your edge as an artist is a good thing”
In a painting, the eye is naturally drawn to areas of discord and disruption, and in their quest to craft ‘lost and found edges’, these three Calgary artists have found common ground, despite quite divergent art styles.
Laurie Aldridge, Louise Lacey Rokosh, and John Webster, aka “we3”, have been painting together since 2015 and this show of work shows their common progress over those 9 years.
Laurie Aldridge has been exploring form and colour through layered ‘blind contour drawings’, allowing the randomness of distorted line work to steer her paintings on their own course. “There is both a joy and terror to letting yourself go with marks that will either energize or kill a work in progress”. That’s the fun of these lost and found edges.
Louise recently discovered the joy of gouache. The immediacy of the medium and the purity of the colour appeals to her creative sensibilities. “It’s like painting with melted ice cream!” She tries to recreate the energy and colour of gouache in her large scale oil and acrylic panels. She uses distinctive loose mark-making to block in big shapes and aggressively scrapes back to lose edges before refining the elements and “finding the edges” through layers.
For Webster, known for his depiction of ‘disrupted realism’ wildlife works at Mountain Galleries at the Fairmont, this show is a shift back to his original interest in figurative work. The subject matter may be different, but the process is the same: “I start all my paintings with an abstract exploration of colour and texture, and then build my figure on top, allowing those underpainting marks to influence the image”. Intentional disruptive marks over realistic imagery can bring about engaging results. The figure can get lost and found in these marks.
“Lost and Found” runs August 20 to 25 at Christine Klassen Galleries with opening reception Thursday August 22, 5 to 8 pm and artist talks Saturday August 24, 2 to 4
FOR MORE INFO CLICK HERE TO EMAIL JOHN OR CALL 403-609-0956