Over the years, several artists have identified the look of Vancouver. Jack Shadbolt’s paintings of the urban landscape during and after the Second World War, Michael Klukner’s watercolours of “disappearing” Vancouver in the 1980s, the distorted city scenes of Tiko Kerr and the post-Emily Carr brilliance of Drew Burnham — all have caught my attention. And now, through a handsome art volume just published, I have discovered Ross Penhall.
Penhall roams the suburban streets and woodland trails that are such a part of suburban Vancouver. Sidewalks, boulevards, hedges, and spacious streets planted with ornamental trees are his subject matter, which he depicts entirely without cars, overhead wires, advertising or people, with maybe the side of a house. Among the hedgerows there is rarely more than a sliver of horizon peering out between the ordered plantings. By choice, he seems to paint them in the raking light of early morning.
The atmosphere is serene and calm, without the hint of angst that underlies the early-morning townscapes of the American Edward Hopper. Sweet and sweeping though Penhall’s appear, there is an existential void here, where even buildings keep out of sight. There is a sort of post-apocalyptic sense to his world.
This atmosphere — residents gone to work, nannies and gardeners out of sight — seems true to some of my experiences of Vancouver. I then turned toward the few Victoria scenes Penhall has included. One shows the empty field and simple shapes of the bushes near Circle Drive in Beacon Hill Park, bathed in the late shadows of evening. The other offers the view near Finlayson Point where the path passes through a tunnel of windblown trees. There is a truth to his paintings, but I sense something is missing.
Ross Penhall’s Vancouver, Appetite Book, Toronto 2016, 176 pp., $35
Bill Reid needs no introduction. One of Canada’s greatest artists, his monumental jade canoe, The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, is the centrepiece of Vancouver International Airport; his Skaana, a leaping killer whale, stands before the Vancouver Museum; his huge wood carving, Raven and the First Men, is the glory of the UBC Museum of Anthropology. In 2008, the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art opened its doors, just a block or two away from the Vancouver Art Gallery.
The newest addition to the many books about Reid is Bill Reid Collected, a small handbook of fine illustrations showing prints, drawings, jewelry, carvings — all manner of work across his 50-year career.
Bill Reid Collected is a project of Martine Reid, who was married to Reid until his death in 1998. She has long been active with the Bill Reid Gallery. In her short introduction to this book of pictures, she notes that Reid was born in Victoria in 1920. His American father, William Reid, married his Haida mother, Sophie Gladstone of Skidegate, Haida Gwaii.
The elder Reid was gone by the time Bill Reid was 12 years old, at which time his wife and son set up housekeeping in Victoria. Sophie had been stripped of her heritage by residential school and lost her Indian legal status for marrying a non-native. She left it all behind, and Bill Reid grew up in white society, eventually spending the year 1938 at Victoria College, before he dropped out and headed to Toronto.
It was in the 1950s that Reid began to delve into his native heritage, as inspiration for the jewelry he had learned to make.
“With no one to teach him,” Martine Reid writes, “Reid started by studying Haida objects depicted in early ethnographic publications and those displayed in museum collections.”
I wonder what future works of art will be inspired in the young men and women into whose hands this very useful publication falls. Certainly, Bill Reid Collected has been designed for just that purpose.
Bill Reid Collected, by Martine Reid, Douglas and McIntyre, Vancouver 2016, 168 pp., $19.95
There will never be a lack of landscape painters on this coast. Madrona Gallery (606 View St., 250-380-4660) has a show of Rick Bond’s oils.
He favours complex scenes, such as the Inner Harbour, with densely packed middle grounds. These are built up with a mosaic of atmospheric colours, squarish marks made with a large flat brush.
While the Old Masters blended their colours, and the Impressionists represented the visual plane in a flurry of coloured dots, Bond lays in his brush marks with unblended colours, constantly playing with our notions of foreground and background. This is a signature style, with a “retro” feel.
While Bond is undoubtedly skilful, his manner might soon seem dated.
A more engaging view of the coast inhabits the canvases of Greta Guzek, which can always be found at the West End Gallery (1203 Broad St., 250-388-0009). She paints the arbutus jungle along our shores with insight and confidence, tucking cabins in behind the beach logs and setting fish boats bobbing at anchor. Her colour choices for arbutus bark and leaves are well worth studying, and she calls on a wide range of subject to keep us engaged.
Also at West End Gallery are paintings by Glenn Payan, an artist who lives on Mayne Island. He paints in the carefully graduated tones of Lawren Harris, with each rock, tree and outbuilding precisely defined. His large painting of the Mayne Island lighthouse at the entrance to Active Pass has a “toy town” quality, with lollipop trees. The red and white buildings have been extended vertically in a manner reminiscent of Paul Chester, another West End regular.
Looking at the reproduction, I was about to dismiss Payan’s work as mannered and derivative, but when I stood in the presence of the rather large original, I found that his rendering of Mount Baker in the background is emotionally just right.
