Nests and Trees explores the participating artists use of minimalism and abstraction to explore representation qualities of familiar things as a means of exploring aesthetics and thematic issues.
Vancouver artist Pat Service reveals an intuitive and very personal approach to the landscape with a focus on vibrant, multi-layered colour and distilled form.
Service’s Tree paintings offer seemingly straightforward and, hence, somewhat disarming compositions of coloured grounds and essential forms. We are able to follow what might be called the “devolution” of her work, from the already reductive imagery of the shoreline paintings, through the almost abstract tree works and into the absolutely graphic quality of the wharf series. Service explores an amplified use of abstraction in these breakthrough works. The paintings become separated into sea and sky by a horizon line. This horizon line is a point of meditation and rest between the energetic use of paint, brush strokes, colour and texture above and below the line. In each work it is necessary to investigate the painting from a distance as an impressionist landscape as well as up close where there exists a complex, thick and luscious application of point.
Vicky Marshall’s art practice reveals a personal struggle between abstract expressionism and expressionist representation. Marshall’s enthusiasm for the beauty and bounty of everyday existence, they also speak to human intervention in the natural world .With their swatches of primary, earthy, and acidic colour, their bold gestures, and their thick, black outlines, the objects in Marshall’s studios – her pots, jars, brushes, and especially the squeezed tubes of paint – are as animated and individual as the artist who depicts them. Marshall explores everyday subject matter as a means of revealing the extraordinary beauty that resides within the ordinary object. Marshall tells you that her interest is compelled by “very simple objects that are really close to my heart for whatever reason.” They’re objects that call out to her without demanding an elaborate theoretical or intellectual justification for their realization in her art.
