DETAILS
Landwatch
art by Lynn Malin
Exhibit opens Wednesday, July 22
Exhibition Tours take place on the following Thursdays each starting at 2 p.m.: July 23, Aug. 20, Sept. 17 and Oct. 15
No opening reception will take place
Exhibit runs until Saturday, Oct. 24
Art Gallery of St. Albert
19 Perron St.
Phone 780-460-4310 or visit artgalleryofstalbert.ca
Sometimes being a landscape artist requires a bit of a lift. For Lynn Malin, getting higher has always been a part of her life anyway; she loves to hike, which allows her to “look down on things,” in her words.
Getting into a helicopter to get a different perspective for her compositions seemed like a natural fit.
“It's just fascinating to see how the fields connect to the trees and the bushes and the roads and everything: the natural elements as well as the human elements changing and reorganizing the space. I find it a wonderful point of view, and I find it very hopeful in some strange ways,” she began.
“It seems to me that nature keeps trying and working very hard to keep reinventing itself and coming back. Whatever the human forces do to sort of wreck it, it still has that power. It has the power and that's hopeful. I love looking down on that.”
That is the inspiration for her new Landwatch series, her first exhibit in St. Albert in a decade and the newest show to open at the Art Gallery of St. Albert.
Malin created a number of abstract large-scale mixed media works on Lexan as a way of translating that hopefulness, that lightness of being that can’t help but offer an optimistic view of the world and the people in it as well.
She said she loves the way the light and colour react with the material made from polycarbonate resin thermoplastic that is otherwise used in headlamps and bulletproof glass.
It has a translucent quality that makes you feel like you are looking through something to the earth farther away, she stated, noting the plastic panels add to the ethereal, enlightened quality of the images she designs.
Being up there is important to offer everyone on the ground a better view of the world, one that can easily get muddied with messy human politics, the struggles of the world, and all of the turmoil that COVID-19 has caused.
“I think that's what gives me such a high, to look down because it does take away all the problems. It's so invigorating to look down and to see the world from high up. I love that view. I think a lot of landscape painters are so stuck on the ground – the foreground, middle ground, background – and they're looking with this view. As the years have gone by, I've tried to get up more and more and more to look down and across the land. This point of view from the air has really reinforced that visual look of looking down on the land and exploring how it is.”
