Paintings by two Sunshine Coast artists currently exhibited at the Gibsons Public Market differ dramatically in form but are linked by their creators’ desire to transmit deep emotions.
The alluring landscapes by Gibsons-based painter Julia Dodge are rooted in real-life locales where brooding figures contemplate ethereal skies. Sechelt’s Jan Jensen creates ebullient abstracts in which filaments of energy dart and rebound while offering tantalizing allusions to the material world.
Dodge believes that posture has the power to direct a viewer’s gaze. Her 2007 Namaste show in St. Catharines, Ontario of “22 portraits of strong women I know” featured faces in full view. In contrast, Dodge’s recent landscapes Waiting at Haida Gwaii and Waiting at Roberts Creek depict bodies in silhouette or seen from behind.
“When you’re looking at a person’s back, it’s more like you’re watching them where they are and putting yourself in the picture,” Dodge said, “as opposed to them coming out of the painting at you.”
Dodge taught visual arts at Ontario secondary schools for more than three decades before moving to the Sunshine Coast full-time in 2010. She paints primarily in oils, assembling scenes from photographic references.
“There are times when we wait, with a sense of stillness,” Dodge wrote in her artist’s statement for the Public Market show. She noted that the period of COVID-19 was a quiet time for many people, marked by both uncertainty and expectancy.
The existential rumination of her work What Are We Waiting For, inspired by a cemetery scene in the Saguenay River region of Quebec, is tempered by a flush of pink blossoms left at the foot of a faded gravestone. In Venus of Wilendorf Waits in Davis Bay, the buxom goddess radiates fecundity even in the shadow of salt-bleached driftwood.
“Stillness brings a calm with it,” Dodge said. “It is a time of reflection and memory. After about two or three paintings [in a series], I realized what my paintings are about. And then I do a few more to finish up that idea. I don’t start with something. I like it to evolve.”
Evolution and motion are omnipresent in the abstract acrylic and collage works of Jan Jensen. “When I look at a flower, I never end up painting something that looks like a flower,” she said, “although sometimes things that could be interpreted as flowers appear in my paintings. I’m rarely painting a specific experience. I’m painting my life experience and my reaction to the experience rather than the actual thing.”
The kinetic sweep of Jensen’s strokes in paintings like the two-panel Lineations for Psyche express her belief that motion and life are inexorably linked. She is a practitioner and teacher of Nia, a holistic movement practice that connects the body, mind and spirit.
Even the more subdued tones of her Coastal Weather Reports series fuel vigorous upswells of olive hillocks and crimson clouds.
Another work by Jensen at Sunnycrest Mall is one of many large-scale installations that the artist has created over a career that began in Squamish and Langley before relocating to the Sunshine Coast in 1992. In Dances on Air, the mall’s skylights illuminate her designs on translucent banners.
Jensen regularly fuses mediums. In her canvas Following the Ley Lines, she applies soft pastels on top of acrylic paint.
For Jensen, embracing a range of disciplines helps her retain lightness and curiosity. “The reason why I want to do [art] in so many different ways is that it exemplifies the joy of surviving,” she said. “No matter how bad things looked [in the past], look what’s happened since. I take these small, simple steps around the fear and do it anyway.”
The artworks by Dodge and Jensen remain on display at the Gibson Public Market until Dec. 8. Jensen will also be exhibiting works in her “Garage Gallery” during the upcoming Art Crawl (venue 107).
