The Lake Country Art Gallery is opening an exhibit that will feature the Okanagan at its best: Beautiful, clear, blue skies; deep, refreshing bodies of water; wonderful food and wine and art sprinkled throughout.
Landscape artists have long painted the beautiful Okanagan Valley as paintings of a vineyard, orchard or expansive vista in the warm glow of early evening light are often seen in one’s travels.
While there is value in the conventions of contemporary landscape painting, where everything looks especially serene and lovely, what about looking at the landscape in a slightly different way?
In it’s upcoming exhibition “In a Different Light—the Landscape in Art”, the Lake Country Art Gallery, will present the work of two artists who look at the landscape and depict it a slightly different way.
The exhibition will consist of work by Powell River based artist Rick Cepella and Toronto based artist Stephen Fisher, who each present the landscape in a much different light.
Like many BC-based artists, Cepella is drawn to the land, physically: Decades of outdoor activities, 12 years of work as a biological surveyor and countless hours of field drawing and painting in the rugged backcountry of western Canada continue to shape his work. His work is marked by a free and gestural quality that threatens to break loose from representation totally. Marks, that seem like vast and stormy peaks, upon closer inspection, break down into drips and slips of paint.
Fisher on the other hand, takes a more scientific looking approach. Drawing on the idea of terraforming, Fisher attempts to explore our desire to shape the world through constructions and manipulations of the landscape. Much of his work deals with expressing landforms and landscape in non-traditional manners with preference given to exploring the imagined, digital, and fabricated rather than the natural, such as diagrammatic drawings and paintings.
The pairing of the work of Cepella and Fisher presents landscape in a totally different light.
In A Different Light—the Landscape in Art is open until Aug. 29 at the Lake Country Art Gallery, admission is free.
