Embracing the ordinary

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This article was published 05/02/2018 (2843 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sarah Neville is instilling humour into the doldrums of daily life with splashes of colour and some of her favourite creatures.

Neville’s latest exhibition, Absolutely Average Animals, is currently open at Cre8ery Gallery and Studio (125 Adelaide St.) until Feb. 13.

The Crescentwood-based artist and illustrator said Absolutely Average Animals is the first exhibition that’s really showcased her sense of humour and love of storytelling since graduating from the fine arts program at University of Manitoba in 2012. The exhibit features a mix of oil paintings, watercolour illustrations, and mixed media collages that put Manitoba’s woodland creatures into the day to day scenarios that humans so enthusiastically embrace: pigeons doing pilates, bears riding the bus, and belugas kicking back to watch Netflix.

“There’s a lot of humour and whimsy in my work. So I wanted to embrace that and take the mundane and everyday activities that we experience every day and replace them with animals, to just bring humour to those situations,” Neville, 28, said.

“It’s a day in the life of me, which I feel is pretty average for most people,” Neville said. “I love to bring a smile to someone’s face with my art and give them a little chuckle or laugh. I thought people could relate to these parts of their days.”

Jordan Miller, executive director of Cre8ery, said the exhibition also seems to reflect a lot of Neville’s own traits.

“I’ve seen her shows go from very traditional painting to more of an illustrative style,” Miller said. “I feel like Sarah has strong character development and her characters are extremely quirky and unusual which sort of builds another element into her exhibition, and I think her art goes with her personality as well.”

The exhibit also features tear sheets from Neville’s new colouring book Wood You Like to Colour? that have been completed by kids from the community.

Neville said children’s reactions to art and the way they engage with drawings has always inspired and influenced her work. While she’s dabbled in other genres of painting, including realism, she’s never felt quite comfortable working in other disciplines, she said.

“As I was graduating I was focusing more on my humour side, on my illustrative side, telling stories with paintings, and I think since then I’ve really been migrating that way,” she said.

“This is naturally where I fall into place. I do like to do children’s book illustrating, so it mirrors and goes into these paintings as well.”

Cre8ery is open Tuesday to Friday from 12 to 6 p.m. and Saturday 12 to 5 p.m.