Different artistic approaches to drama

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This article was published 28/03/2016 (3506 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In today’s art world, a painting’s meaning is often made up of references to the “isms” of art history, and to dense networks of critical theories. Some of these paintings are good, even exciting. The people who understand them get to feel very clever indeed (cough, cough). But there are artists for whom painting is a strange miracle of self-expression — capable of generating rich, personal meanings that are wide rather than narrow in scope.

Winnipeg’s Tom Lovatt and Bette Woodland, both represented by Gurevich Fine Art, are two such artists. They met in 1970 while students of the School of Art at the University of Manitoba, got married in 1976, and embarked upon separate art careers. Friday at the Winnipeg Free Press News Café, Lovatt and Woodland will speak about their individual approaches to art-making, to memory, history and beauty. They’ll also speak about negotiating life together as two very different professional artists.

Lovatt is a figure painter, primarily, and is unusually adept at surfaces — the skin over muscles and bones, folds of satin. He paints in a style that has much in common with collage. His canvases brim with lush colour and contain layered, bisected imagery. In much of his work, viewers will recognize elements of museum paintings; the gilded frame, arrangements of fruit and flowers, the young royal posing in stiff refinery. Lovatt has long been fascinated with Diego Velázquez’s portraits of the Infanta, the 17th-century title given to the daughter of a Spanish king. This may seem like a strange preoccupation — Velázquez’s portraits hail from a culture that feels so far removed from our own. But for Lovatt, history is a living thing. It doesn’t expire or exhaust itself, and is something that is with us continuously.

“There’s a psychological weight to her image that appeals to me,” says Lovatt. In many ways his paintings usher the child bride, and her terrible discomfiture, into the present. Observing her sadness, her composed and vacant gaze, and taking in all that intense colour can make for an unsettling experience. The feeling carries over to his other subject matter as well. Certain of his flowers, for example, seem on the cusp of death.

Woodland’s paintings are no less dramatic, though she paints what is most familiar — Prairie skies, children playing, farm animals. What unifies all her paintings is a saturated, golden light.

“The transformative character of some kinds of light, a kind of intensity, amplifies and expands the ordinary. That’s what interests me; that’s what I want to paint,” she says.

Woodland and Lovatt are generous in conversation, and among the things they’ll touch on Friday is how they have stayed the course, resisting trends and pressures of a changing art world in order to stay true to their vision. Figurative painting, for example, has gone in and out of style.

And Woodland knows pastoral scenes are frequently disparaged, acknowledging what she calls the art world’s hierarchy of subject matter. “There’s this notion that if the public is drawn to it, it must be bad,” she says. “I think it takes courage to paint sunsets, children and animals.”

Woodland’s paintings are far from sentimental. Rather, they are investigations into how children relate to space and how they create their own imaginary narratives. Her landscapes are not copies of the real but are pastiches of her varied impressions. She’s an expert at capturing the diffuse light before a storm, and heavy, dark-bellied clouds. Her animals are full of character and are sentient beings. She comes by her subject matter honestly, having grown up on a farm in southern Ontario.

Both Woodland and Lovatt agree that artists don’t own their painting’s meanings. Nor is meaning encoded or embedded in the painting itself. Meanings shift over time, are transient. Like people, paintings can be very unstable.

Lovatt’s paintings are somewhere between dream and nightmare, are strangely vivid and intensely introspective. “Tom’s paintings are very complex constructions,” says Woodland. Woodland’s, on the other hand, are grounded in everyday life. In a rare and wonderful way, they are places for people to convene. “They hallow the moment,” offers Lovatt.

 

Sarah Swan is the host of Art Talk/Art Walk. To reserve a ticket for this event, please call 204-697-7069.