Outside world makes the 'art'side at VASA

The name of the new show coming to the Visual Arts Studio Association tomorrow is Between Earth and Sky: Portraits of Rural Alberta.

Considering the work of the two artists involved, it would also be appropriate to call the exhibit Between Major Categories of Artistic Movements. Marilynn Jeffrey and David Scott both offer fine samples of impressionist and hyperrealist landscape scenes, respectively.

Of course, the exhibit’s original title is better.

Barrhead artist Jeffrey admits that she lives on a beautiful acreage near Barrhead. She can’t help but be busy spending her days painting the countryside at a place called Freedom Corner. It sounds like a great place. She agrees.

“It is. It’s very nice here. Everywhere I go, there’s something to inspire me to paint.”

Her works are strongly representative of the prairie aesthetic: rolling hills, big skies, farm shacks of old wood and everything else that you would expect to see in life outside of the city. She’s lived in the area for a fairly good portion of her life. It’s for the reason that the influence of the actual landscape has been so pervasive that she can’t help but turn it around and paint it out with her oils on canvas. There are approximately 20 of her pieces in the exhibit.

“Most of the paintings in the show are from where I live. They’re somewhere like down the road, up the road … within 10 or 15 miles.”

She lived in Kelowna for a time as well but still the Alberta geography has her heart, at least for this show.

Jeffrey’s counterpart this time around is Scott, a New Zealand native who was part of the recent mass migration of artists to the VASA fold within the last year or two.

He seems to focus on two distinct oeuvres in his practise, one being the kinds of abstract expressionist portraits or animal studies that exude so much vitality and energy that the viewer can’t help but imagine the images in motion.

For this show, however, everything reaches an eerie calm with his landscape scenes. They are so still that they should be called still lifes, except you won’t see any bowls of apples or pears. These are hyper-realistic and incredibly detailed studies of nature scenes.

“I vary my work a little bit. A little bit abstract, like still lifes with form. I guess it’s more expressionism as well,” he explains.

These works are as awe-inspiring with their attention to the minutiae of the world that one’s eyes are drawn into them in a way that’s entirely different but equally as engrossing as Jeffrey’s. Between Earth and Sky shows the best of both of those two worlds of art movements, as well as the best views of our world at the same time.