Canadian chanteuse Leslie Feist sings about how the circle married the line on her latest album, Metals, but Armstrong artist Alistair Rance has his own story on how his recent paintings started taking shape.
And it all started as seamless lines drawn by the hand of a three-year-old.
“The paintings I have done are all in free hand, eight all together. I call them the Everett Series after my son,” said Rance, who is about to show his work in a solo exhibition at the Vernon Public Art Gallery.
As someone who has been immersed in study the past few years, and who has four children, Rance says his main objective with his art nowadays is to have fun.
He likes to work fast, using repetitive forms that are mostly geometrical.
An architectural and fine arts graduate, who received his bachelor of fine arts at UBC Okanagan and his masters at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax, and just attended UBC for its Masters of Architecture Program, Rance has always been interested in design, using straight-edged shapes to create his drawings.
“My high school dream was to be an architect,” he said. “My dad was a master painter, and I ended up working with him for eight years and when he retired, I took over the business. It was not as creative as I would have liked it to be, so I went back to school when I was 30 and did well on my bachelor’s. I was married with three kids when I started and had four kids by the time I finished.”
At the end of completing his degree, Rance says he started working with repetition of a single form in his artwork.
“I gravitated towards painting. I like sculpture and building with my hands, but I became more literal with my expression. With painting, I had more freedom to express myself.”
Rance began drawing rectangles and squares in free hand using a lot of right angle lines, however, as time went on he wanted to break away from the rectangle/square, and was looking forward for something to do quickly.
It was while spending time with his youngest son, Everett, that the catalyst hit him.
“We were sitting at the computer together, with Microsoft Paint open. He pulled the mouse and whipped it back and forth and drew these lines,” said Rance. “In the drawing we did together, and looking over the lines, I understood that this could be done quickly, with lines over lines.”
Rance applied a similar technique by pouring paint in linear formation on giant canvasses, creating colourful and textural paintings that have a three-dimensional appearance.
“I like paint as a material,” he said. “I like the texture of paint, the sculptural elements.”
Working in a small studio at his Armstrong residence, Rance used the floor as his easel, pouring the paint straight down onto the canvas.
“I whip my hand across the canvas so that I can work quickly,” he said. “The paint finds its own place. It oozes and settles down. It has the freedom to do its own thing. It’s not 100 per cent in control. That’s why I don’t work with a brush. Pouring helps me let go of the paint. It’s a bit of a release.”
Rance has also encouraged people to touch his paintings, as he did when Vernon Public Art Gallery curator Lubos Culen visited his studio. (It was after Rance sent Culen some digital drawings more than a year ago that the idea to show the Everett Series at the art gallery began.)
“Because my paintings are so textured to come across, I enjoy touching them… They are so lumpy and bumpy.”
Rance’s Everett Series opens at the VPAG on Aug. 2. Also opening is the work of Okanagan First Nation artist David Wilson in the exhibition, We Are the People of the Heart, Marlene McPherson’s Okanagan Dream Series, and Creekside Landing Retirement Home Artists’ Featuring Vernon.
All are welcome to attend the opening reception on Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m.
The exhibitions continue at the gallery until Oct. 22.
For more information, visit www.vernonpublicartgallery.com or call 250-545-3173.
