Still fishing!

Shoal Point Ccffee at Fisherman’s Wharf located at the end of the wharf at what is called Shoal Point has hosted BarbWilson  artwork for a number of years. Currently many original drawings of her boats remain on display along with three of her more abstract paintings.

Photographic prints of these originals are available at the actual size of 11×14 for a price of $40. Mailing cost would be additional.

The entire show of framed originals currently at Shoal Point coffee  is for sale at a price of $2000.

Barb will continue to draw and paint at the wharf this summer where  she enjoys  greeting  the many international visitors who enjoy walking on the docks. Children often are delighted by the appearance of seals that can frequently  be seen in the water at the end of the dock.

FISHING BOATS AND FACES

New year is here. And now Covid-19! I’ve just turned 80. What am I going to do WITH MY ART in 2020?


This past December 3rd, it has been my good fortune to present an exhibition of twelve new sketches of fishing boats at Fisherman’s wharf here in Victoria BC. All done during the good weather in Victoria this past September, but now I’m thinking portraits!


Thinking portraits. Yes, Portraits. Faces. Funny how drawing fishing boats is like drawing faces. Each boat has its own personality: windows at the front are like eyes and the relationships must be right to get a likeness. Over the front windows are “eyebrows”.
I’ve always liked figure drawing but have shied from doing faces in any detail. And figures are like boats, they have curves you must represent in space, intuiting perspective.
Yet throughout my life and particularly in the 1970s SELF portraits were important. Occasionally a stranger would sit for me in my studio.


Photography changed portraiture. Algorithms can recognize faces. Reconstructions of faces are being made from DNA information, but what is it that captures the uncanny humanness, what is it that an artist can bring to a rendering that expresses, inspires, transcends?
Can one look for a way to capture the essence of a human being, that “likeness of spirit” ideally in as few moves as possible. Comics, and caricatures can do that as can expressionist works.
For those of you interested in philosophy, my inspiration comes from Jewish Lithuanian French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas where “The First Philosophy is Ethics, not epistemology”. He has written about how THE FACE is how we encounter the OTHER.


So here was my thinking before covid 19:
Persons willing to sit for a portrait can do that and keep the painting at the end if they like it. Yes, I need practice. I will sign the works. Sitting time about two hours but with good rest breaks. I will keep a photograph of the finished work.
Now, in this period of pandemic I invite you to pull out a mirror as I have done and do a self portrait. Record your own face as a record of this time when you lived through this incredible moment of history!

Say it with flowers

Saying it with flowers

Recently, on Valentines day, flowers arrived at my door in fresh condition, a bouquet much appreciated and subsequently watched over as the blooms matured and finally went to seed. Although I do not paint from photographs, I love photographing the progress of the flowers as they age towards death with each stage offering new inspiration for the painter. Capturing the sharp definition of negative space is what one “goes for” in tulips as they age, bending over as they do with such graceful curves.

It’s remarkable how tulips open wide into a full beauty yielding up their velvet like core of seeds. For some, this stage of Nature’s aging might seem grotesque and the flowers would be pitched in the dump. Yet it is this stage of aging that invites expression. As blooms age we might choose to intervene and select healthier younger blooms to make new arrangements and that’s OK too.

As artists we do love cut flowers because they have a life energy that is different from the purely visual delight of artificial silk or plastic ones even if it they are aesthetically manufactured. Cut flowers, to the artist, are a gift of life that invites the creative spirit but the creations “to be” cannot indefinitely be procrastinated. Painting flowers may be “still life” but that stillness is deceptive. Over the period of a day or a week the flowers change although not as fast as the change one must contend with in drawing or painting animals at the zoo or people in the park.

I respect the voluptuousness of the wide-open mature tulip. As a woman I hope I can continue to express lifeforce and beauty as I age. Beauty within that comes from above, that is not contrived, yet shines for others to see. Environmentally speaking, I know that flowers take a lot of water, when commercially produced, and that demand can harm some economies, yet I contine to love the people in my life who “say it with flowers”. And I promise paintings in return.

Last days of the Shoal Point exibition!

 

Painting at Fisherman’s Wharf with Jennifer, Photo Brian Merth

It’s been great to come back to Victoria and have a show up close to home! Thanks to Michael, Peter, Brian, and more for help with this. Come see it now as tomorrow is the last day! 

Fisherman’s Wharf is undeniably my favourite place to paint in all of Victoria. Resident in the city now for the past nine years, I often come to Fisherman’s Wharf because I enjoy the challenges of drawing ships. Here at Shoal point are moored the real working boats as opposed to the more plastic recreational type vessels.

Painting now for 62 years, I have had  a large body of work that has concerned landscape and architecture, My most recent compositions  have largely been nonobjective abstract works painted with no object or picture in mind. But I think these same improvisations draw subliminally on my long years of sketching and painting outdoors.

As a dancer I believe I have benefited from long years of movement experience in space, which informs my work. I particularly love drawing the human figure, which I claim presents much of the same challenge as do ships: sensuous curves in space that require a well-developed understanding of perspective.

This November, the exhibition at Moka House Shoal Point is curated by Michael Beach featuring works he has chosen to reflect the plein air inspiration of the working boats alongside some of the recent Barbara Wilson abstract compositions. Think Christmas – Works are for sale with prices negotiable.

I will be pleased to chat with friends and patrons at Moka house on Wednesday mornings 9 to 11 am, Friday afternoons 2 to 4 pm, or Sundays 1 to 3 pm during the month of November.

Exhibition November 2 to November 29

Shoal Point Moka House (Fisherman’s Wharf)

M-F 7am-4:30pm
Weekends 8:00am-4:30pm

Owner Katie Kim

Winnipeg to Victoria

Well, it was a faboulous time in Winnipeg – thanks to all those generous people who helped me me along the way! Here are a couple of pictures from the show. People in the top picture are (from left to right) Dr. Brenda Cantelo, Senior Fellow, St. John’s College; Barb; Liv Valmestad, Junior Fellow, St. Johns’ College; and Dr. Esyllt Jones, Dean of Studies, St. John’s College.

Winnipeg Show starts today!

It’s great to be back in Winnipeg spending time with family that I had rarely had to the chance to meet before. My show starts today, Very exciting! below is the Curator’s (Dr. Brenda Cantelo) statement.

Wilson’s exhibition, “Where I Come From,” addresses two fundamental questions: the first is existential and the second deals with place.  On the one hand, her “visual improvisations” are an interior journey of discovery where she seeks to find her deepest and earliest sense of self – literally where the “I” comes from.   This is a dynamic rather than static process.  Wilson recognizes that even one’s sense of self changes over time as reflected in her moving, probing and searching lines. Change in the broadest sense is a constant and an inevitable part of life as nature, people, places and even memories are in flux.  This is the second way in which her work can be understood, as the “Where” I come from. After decades away from Winnipeg, Wilson returns to childhood places and reflects on childhood memories of place.   Her work compels audiences to think about the transitory nature of ourselves and of our world. 

 

 

WHERE I COME FROM

 

WHERE I COME FROM is a good question. When I was about three years old my mother read me a children’s book pointing to a tiny white dot, just a barely visible spec on a big black rectangle in the middle of a book about that very question. She told me that this was the size of the seed was that came from my father. So very small. Over the past seventy odd years I’ve wrestled with that question of origin at other levels; begotten not made. My mother didn’t create me as a work of art. She bore me.

 

I’m very proud to be going back to the city where I was born to rediscover some of the geography of my birth as well as trying to answer some of the questions about the origin of my own creative roots in painting and dance. I claim that I create through the kinesthetic sense and that my awareness, or at least “her” awareness, of my being was from the first time I began kicking in my mother’s uterus. (We used scientific terms for anatomy when I was growing up). I am still kicking as I paint albeit with my hand and whole body as I hold a brush or other implement.

In September I return to Winnipeg the place of my birth in November 1939. Having left Winnipeg just before the age of two, I surprisingly do have a few memories, spatial and kinesthetic, of playing hide and seek under the dining table with grandmother Kibblewhite. Or standing in my crib and teething on the white lead paint rails. Or butting my head against the top of the crib as I slept on my stomach by preference. I do wonder if  any trace memories might emerge as I seek out the houses and churches still standing where I enjoyed those first almost two years in Manitoba. World war II erupted the month I was born ending the preoccupation of Manitobans’ economic hard times of the depression which my family endured.

I am interested in the culture of Manitoba and the social activism of the 1930s as well as the musical culture of the city which was core to my mothers artistic being as a soprano soloist. I would have had the gift of her breath and the joy of her song as I grew inside her.

Most of the paintings of the last few years have been abstract expressive improvisations. There is no idea of form or image in my mind as I am careful to empty my mind through a mediation before picking up my brush. Yet it can often be that tiny spec on the canvas, that mark, or “seed”, which subliminally precipitates a cascade of gestures, an “event”, which becomes the painting. These gestural moves are experienced as a dance energy coming out of my body.

 

 

In Winnipeg I fantasize that there might emerge some uncanny connection with the geomatic coordinates of where I began. Houses of early toddlerhood still exist. The anticipation of this journey is energizing current painting work!

WHERE I COME FROM follows last years BC exhibition COMING FROM NOWHERE.

The new show opens September 24 at St John’s College, the University of Manitoba in “The Quiet Room” The official opening reception is Tuesday September 25 from 3 to 5 pm with an artist talk at 2:30.

The show is curated by Dr. Brenda Cantelo

 

 

 

Spring Colour

Spring Colours

There’s a beautiful wildness in the spring colour that’s bursting out everywhere in Victoria as I write. “Dehiscence” is the biological word that describes the spontaneous rupture of flower buds or plant fruit pods that happens at this time, as plants become energised in the warmer weather and increasing daylight. In our human world this energy is infectious. Spring fever. The extra hours of sunlight are welcome as we enjoy longer natural light even in my studio. (See the new painting done Friday March 9). Although much of the universe appears mysterious, through observation, we can detect patterns and interpret meaning. Similarly, the often mystical experience of painting offers a new view of emerging landscapes, or those currently hidden.

Please celebrate with me the power of colour that is given to us in flowers, so that they can express their attractiveness to other creatures in the ecosystem. As an artist, my current journey will take me to a tracing family roots with some of architecture and landscape associated with that. Please stand by for reports and images as this unfolds!

COMING FROM NOWHERE now a reality!

Celebration after a lot of peoples’ hard work!

The show is hung and is now open at the Galiano Island Community Library. Please come and enjoy!

The show is open from September 6th until October 27th, 2017.

The hours are:
Wed – Sun: 11am – 2pm
Extended hours Thur: 2pm-5pm

At #2 – 1290 Sturdies Bay Road, Galiano Island, BC

Here is a price list of the paintings in the show that you can download.