MOST RECENT EXHIBITION
La vie en Couleur / The Colour of Life
by Michael Abraham
The Inlet
by David A. Haughton
L1: La vie en Couleur
by Michael Abraham
The process of making art is very much feeling one’s aliveness, insignificance, bravado, greatness, feebleness. Not being bound by realism allows the freedom to think, probe, explore, play. Hence the colour of life!
In this body of work motivation has come from a number of things, including art, literature, the media, politics, philosophy, religious studies, psychology, business world, family life, interpersonal relationships, and of course emotions and feelings. Approaching this work as a non-linear thinker Abraham's work is both subjective and based in reality, a melding of the inner and outer world. Art is a reflection of life: living, growing, dying, serious, funny, absurd, joyous, hard, paradoxical, sensuous, scary, communal, divisive… all things, all at once, and ever-changing.
L0: The Inlet
by David A. Haughton
I moved to Vancouver in 1991 and instantly fell in love with the Burrard Inlet: mountains, clouds, beach volleyball, sunsets – and a froth of sea planes, sailboats, windsurfers and freighters going back and forth. For thirty-two years I have painted the Burrard Inlet and the inner working harbour. As Monet once did with cathedrals and haystacks, I have returned again and again to certain locations – Strathcona, Ambleside, Lion’s Gate Bridge, Jericho Beach, Spanish Banks and the Second Beach pool – to capture subtle shifts of viewpoint and changes in lighting. I find oil tankers and cargo freighters the most interesting architectural objects in our landscape – objects whose shapes change and distort as they slowly rotate with the tides. Weak yellow lights glow from the small cabins of their crewmen, making the ships appear to be mysterious fortified floating monasteries with tangled cranes serving as rococo superstructure.
I admire how the older ships – with their now-obsolete design, patches of peeling paint and rusting steel hulls – maintain a quiet dignity while accepting their fate: gradual decrepitude or sudden doom on a breaker’s dock.
We live in a rapidly changing world, with shifting weather patterns, melting glaciers, burning forests and depleted seas. I hope these simple paintings set off sympathetic vibrations in their audience, with greater appreciation of the evanescence of human endeavour and anticipatory nostalgia for the fragile beauty of our present landscape.