The debut gallery exhibition of a self-taught painter with a background in interior design offers heightened perspectives on urban and coastal scenery.
Mid-air vantage points distinguish the mixed-media works of Odile Gagné, a Sunshine Coast artist whose current show — Our Playful Seascape — opened in Joe’s Lounge of the Gibsons Public Art Gallery with a public reception on Aug. 3.
“I like the angles,” Gagné said. “It really does appeal to me instead of something flat. It allows me to play a little bit more: making [the images] more whimsical and not so stiff.”
In mixed-media works like Coal Harbour, Gagné assembles familiar landmarks (the Harbour Centre tower, the Lion’s Gate Bridge) into brightly coloured studies that strip complex geographies to their essential elements. Beyond the monumental towers of Vancouver’s urban core, sailboats and seaplanes navigate amber striations of the sun-drenched narrows.
The familiar contours of Harbour Centre’s revolving restaurant reappear in Summer Time, in which the bright white sails of Canada Place are striped with cobalt-coloured shadows. Seen from above, the city’s conflicts and convolutions are distilled into effervescent tonic for metropolitan angst.
Gagné’s professional background includes work in the travel industry and two decades operating a lifestyle gift store in Steveston Village. Building on experience in interior decoration, her painting skills are self-taught.
“I dabbled in painting and I was having fun with it, doing some custom work,” she recalled. “Then the store got busier and busier and I never had time until COVID hit.”
The bright colours of her palette stem from acrylic paint, but each canvas is in fact a mixed-media work that begins with collage. In Crustacean Sensation, a geometric harmony in gold and indigo depicting a moored crabbing vessel, textual fragments from an overpainted marine chart seep through the pigment: the stretch of Shoal Channel between Gibsons and Langdale fades into view near the boat’s bow. The aureate sky is segmented into conjoined fragments that suggest a tesserae mosaic.
“I start with sketches just to see if I can create the right design for the space,” Gagné said. “I’ll create a few designs until I feel that it works, and it’s all balanced.”
Balance is of paramount importance in her depiction of harbour ferries in formation (Ferry Dance) in False Creek. The passenger boats trace a figure-eight on the water’s surface; the Granville and Burrard bridges are aligned with perfect symmetry. The brooding mountains of the North Shore range glower on the horizon. For once, their craggy features do not dominate the cityscape: they serve the exultant patterns of city architecture in a supporting role.
As Gagné adds to her body of work in preparation for this fall’s Art Crawl (she participated last year for the first time), she is experimenting with greater degrees of abstraction. Her work Watching Over You straddles the line between crepuscular seascape and geometric phantasm. A pair of vessels are coupled, with oversize superstructures extending beyond the image’s border. Ripples emanate from blocky buoys while distant orcas breech.
“I was trying to let go and be a little more abstract,” Gagné said. “I decided that maybe I would make a big monster ship, but I couldn’t get rid of my little guy. So I decided that it would be like a phantom boat watching over the little one.”
Gagné’s Our Playful Seascape remains on display at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery until Aug. 25.
