"Winnipeg artists, Mary Valentine and David Owen Lucas, have travelled widely across Canada and portrayed many dimensions of the country. Together, they give us a rich and varied palette— Canada’s wide expanses, its tiny details, as well as particular personal vignettes. They both see with eyes looking past and future simultaneously. Valentine and Lucas have been painting for years. While their stories are different, their perceptions and many of their sensitivities to the land overlap. Their insights are deep and their love of the country, with all its strengths and vulnerabilities, are eloquently expressed as they celebrate the magnificence they see in Canada.
Valentine usually explores uninhabited parts of the country, taking her canvases and painting materials with her wherever she goes—north, west or east. She often goes alone—in early years camping in remote places. She sketches and paints on site, using ink, pencil, oil and pastel. Once, when in the north, a group of children watching her sitting alone, absorbed in her painting and subject, exclaimed: “You are copying our land!” Using several sizes of canvases, that IS exactly what she does, whether it is the rhythmic, twisted, moss-covered roots of the undergrowth in Haida Gwaii in British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands; the Newfoundland fishing villages; or northern ice flows. The textures, structure, colours and movement in the fabric of the land, its intimacy and ruggedness, are Valentine’s subject. She portrays it all with an understanding of its history, its formations and certainly its tones. Her brushwork is deft; her form solid.
Lucas paints in both large scale, and small, and works in oil, acrylic and watercolour, pencil and ink. He photographs the sites, light, buildings, spaces and vistas that captivate his creative eye. The human imprint on the land, or the ‘underbelly of the urban scape’, interests him particularly: historic buildings, as in Winter Palace, Brandon’s national historic site, or the often neglected spaces under a bridge, as Disraeli Undertow. He is also captivated by the huge sweep of the rhythms of the land with its long horizons so powerfully conveyed in Grand Valley. "
(By Patricia Bovey, FRSA)
© 2009
Galerie Buhler Gallery. All Rights Reserved.