POV@MACC gallery April – May 2022
Art Brendon – Covid 19 project
The Metchosin Arts & Cultural Centre offers four hallway galleries for display of work by local artists. For the next two months the art of past President Art Brendon will be featured. See the artist’s statement below.
There is no charge to artists for displaying their work in these galleries. See details on the POV page.
*Nonobjective Art Definition: art that doesn’t depend on the appearance of the visual world as a starting point; the assumption is that art doesn’t have to be about anything other than formal elements which define the composition; scale or size, shape, value, line, colour, contrast, texture, form within a space.
Art Brendon – Artist Statement
These paintings represent the influence of my teachers on forming me as an artist. Walter Dexter was one of my first formal art teachers. What I learned from Walter was not exclusively about clay or glaze, or any specific medium, just an approach to visual art; that artists learn from all sources, acquire many influences, and that art making wasn’t about the materials and mediums. These paintings are my concept of time and a place, non-objective and without a specific genre. Paintings reduced to the elements of visual art, a minimalist approach which helps me to focus on intention rather than what I’m attempting to paint.
My tribute to Walter Dexter
I owe much of what I’ve done in art, as a career and life’s work to Walter Dexter’s influence when I was his student in Nelson. I met Walter in the ceramics studio at the Kootenay School of Art in 1970. I was 18 years old, and was overwhelmed by the skill and talent at the art school. The place that I was most secure was the pottery studio. Walter was a wonderful supportive teacher, that gave us all confidence. I trusted his honest judgement and critiques on our first efforts. He was encouraging and allowed his students to find their way with clay. I learned that the process of discovery was more important than the product, in my development as a student. This is something that I’ve retained and teach my students, making art is a process of developing skills and techniques with materials, which leads eventually to a product which has a purpose and is meaningful. I believe that Walter was about letting his student experience learning with guidance, rather than being told what to do and how to do it. Walter and I shared another common experience, we both studied ceramics with Luke Lindoe in Alberta. I was with Luke in Medicine Hat for two years before moving to Victoria in 1974. Walter and Luke shared a similar approach to teaching and making art; watch and listen, ask questions later when you have some experience on which to base your questions. The ‘’art talk’’ philosophy came later, usually in an art history class or in the bar over a few beers. Art will explain itself and people will accept it or leave it. Some of us enjoy the challenge of ambiguity and finding our own meaning in artworks, without being directed by the artist to accept familiar predetermined subjects, topics or narratives. In visual art, similar to other art forms, music, dance, literature, movies and theatre, we choose what we like, which is often what we know. *Non-objective art has a following, for me it’s like jazz, which is to say that jazz also has a following no matter how challenging, I find that it’s liberating and meaningful.
Art Brendon March/April 2022
*Nonobjective Art Definition: art that doesn’t depend on the appearance of the visual world as a starting point; the assumption is that art doesn’t have to be about anything other than formal elements which define the composition; scale or size, shape, value, line, colour, contrast, texture, form within a space. The Paintings; They are all oil paint on canvas completed over the last two years, my COVID 19 project in between teaching on-line and in person classes of Art and Design at Brookes Westshore School in Colwood.
- An imagined place through overcast skies, a scene that is appearing or approaching rather than disappearing into the clouds. $2000. Framed
- Triptych – I grew up on a beach where the sandbars and tidal pools reflected the sunlight at low tide. The sandbars formed various shapes that were smooth and aligned on Semiahmoo bay. $3200.
- Diptych – Learning to use a potters wheel when I was 15, I found everything was spinning at the end of the day, water and clay mud. It never left me and 55 year later I can still feel the clay spinning through my hands. This painting is about the times with Walter Dexter. The colours reminded me of the water and glaze. $7500.
- Rain and foggy overcast days are my favourite painting days. Watching the weather pass through the straits from my house is endlessly entertaining, a movie of sorts. I find this to be inspirational. On sunny days I’m outside and not painting. $2400.
- Old logs washing up on the beach, preserved by years of salt water exposure. They remind me of cattle bones in the desert that I’ve seen in New Mexico at Ghost Ranch, Georgia O’Keeffe’s home and summer studio. $700. 6. Red, greys, and pinks edges and shapes that fit together in a composition that shows a fluid movement, or at least that was the intention; not to be stationary or solid with the shapes. $2200.
- Somewhere between the land, sea and sky all things are reflected back at each other to form a colour harmony. $2700.
- The wind at sunset, clouds overcast clearing sky. My approach has been to reduce the elements in the paintings not to simplify, fewer things like shapes or textures and emphasis on variation and colour harmonies. $2200.
I can be reached through my e mail at ab@islandnet.com