Monday, January 22, 2007

Stuff Seen - Les Pastellistes

Howdy!



B

Back in November I went to Ogilvies to see the the Pastel Society of Eastern Canada's 11th Annual National Juried exhibition. (Man what a mouthful!) In a nutshell, In the program I marked little stars next to the names of Patricia Roy-Callahan, Carl Desrosiers, Christiane Plante, and Veronica Takas-Fragman. I guess that means that I liked thier work. I also think that I got a big kick out of seeing Tudor Hall for the first time, it truly is 'an amazing place in the heart of downtown.' Although I gotta admit that I don't remember too many of the 104 paintings that were hung on the walls.

Basically, they had just finished hanging the show and were running around doing last minute fine tuning. This meant that there weren't that many other people hanging around, which is always how I like to see art. On the positive side, I obviously got a big kick out of the sincerity of the whole event. Because there was an awful lot of art that not only wasn't my cup of tea, it wasn't my glass of water, nor was it my jar of pickles, nor was it my plastic container of last night's leftover chili. In fact it was an awful lot of landscapes and portraits, some of them done by artists who had a technique that could be charitably called 'grade 8 level.' But even if a bunch of it was only done at an eighth grade level, that's still about 9 grades higher than anything I could do.

However, when it wasn't done at an eighth grade level, it appeared to me that it was done at some sort of Ph D. level. There were a bunch of folk, like the one's mentioned above who really knew there way around the medium. Then on top of that I actually recognized one of the subjects of one of the paintings. Being a life drawing model still pays relatively well.

No comments:

Post a Comment