Local abstract painters Carin Covin and Alistair Rance may have different perspectives, however, they operate in the same arena.
Their work, which will be paired in the new exhibition, This That, opening this week at Vernon’s Headbones Gallery, uses two different approaches to non-objective, abstract art.
“They are diametric to one another, although not opposed,” said Headbones’ artist and owner Julie Oakes, adding, where Rance expresses, Covin considers.
“Rance is an action painter; Covin, an abstract painter.”
Covin examines an aspect of physical reality and then transforms it into non-objective painting, while Rance’s work may suggest the physical plane after the fact — as in its architectonic overtones — but it is aesthetically divorced from the real world so that an open-ended relationship is permitted to the person who is in front of this series, said Oakes.
Covin has her imagery based in the real world. Her latest paintings began as a series of sketches of graveyards made at a summer workshop in Wells, B.C.
In the colour sketches that began this body of work, there is a cemetery hinted at, one with a secluded, overgrown, private aura. An iron fence or the decorative top of a commemorative stone caught Covin’s eye and she began to work with it, said Oakes, who visited Covin’s studio on the westside of Okanagan Lake.
“The twists and turns of the shape veer slightly away from the first painting to the second and continue the permutation or translation in increments. The link to that first physical shape dims from its first meaning and a brand, new presence overrides the origin,” she said.
Rance, whose work was seen recently in the exhibition The Everett Series at the Vernon Public Art Gallery, is more spontaneous.
The Armstrong fine arts and architecture graduate uses a floor drip method, much like Jackson Pollock’s, but the drips are wider and more plastic, done in a shiny acrylic that appears to have been arrested in viscosity, said Oakes.
“There is an architectonic echo in Rance’s work as if at the site of a high-rise building under construction. Even the smaller pieces appear larger than they are for the strokes of paint appear to extend beyond the boundaries of the canvases,” she said. “There is no subject reference in Rance’s paintings. They are simply the materials and the gesture of the artist so that the work relates only to the act of painting.”
An opening reception for This That takes place Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m. Performing at the reception is Zentangle, featuring Daniel Stark on sarode, Paul Langlois on percussion and Jonathon Heaven on hang pan, a Swiss-invented percussive instrument resembling a flying saucer.
This That continues at Headbones to May 6. The gallery is located at 6700 Old Kamloops Rd.
