The opening reception of the Friends of the Gallery show at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre is always an informal, fun affair. There’s nothing pretentious about this crowd – no prima donnas and no snooty art critics either. This year about 85 artists joined the rush to fill the gallery walls with mostly painting, some photographs and a handful of three-dimensional works.
Members of the Sunshine Coast Arts Council are invited to bring in one piece created over the past year that presumably they are proud of – it’s not necessarily the same piece that a jury might select, which is what makes the show interesting. This year it was a little tougher as organizers did not accept any very large wall art in order to find room for the many entries.
Painting inspired by the natural surroundings is always popular. Doug Jinkerson’s acrylic of a tugboat in the strait and Rae Sutcliffe’s textured acrylic of a ship in Nootka Sound during heavy weather took the viewer out onto the ocean. Nefri Lyske’s Spring Dancers depicts gulls on a Roberts Creek beach. Eileen Berczik’s Seafood Salad portrays a fierce crab among the greens.
Sheila Page’s landscape puts us firmly back in the translucent green, forest floor that is so familiar, while Jeffrey Gogol’s photo titled Bend Back shows an arched and distorted living tree. Cornelia Van Berkel’s owl painting is set in a mixed media forest of bark. Jone Pane’s Ugly Duckling photo looks like a Monet watercolour. Lynda Manson’s acrylic, Pond at Norton Simon Museum (California), has a dreamy quality. Bruce Edwards’ oil painting tells a story: a little girl dressed in pink examines with curiosity a snake poised in the pink digitalis (foxglove) – it’s innocence meeting the serpent.
Sculptural works were intriguing. Tam Harrington portrayed a skull in an encaustic assemblage titled Dia de Muertos. Jean Pierre Desjarlais showed his carved sapsucker pecking a tree branch. Franca Serena Tesloveanu’s Pandora and the Evils is a fine combination of materials: paper, clay, wire, cloth and wool, in which a blonde doll opens a box of red-tongued serpents. Nell Burns, a fibre artist, shows her Sea Spicules Lamp made with approximately 40,000 silk stitches. Touch is not forbidden – it’s like touching a living thing.
Some of the more interesting works were those that played with the mind. W.T. Hulme’s Mindscape shows a Rorschach inkblot face among the canyon cliffs in what first appears to be a simple pastel. Kathleen Hughes paints an acrylic titled Out of the Darkness, yet the shadowy figure could be either merging with the light or disintegrating entirely. Yuri Keschak’s Birds of Paradise is a whimsical acrylic in which an elegant lady is wearing a hat of many colourful birds. Margery Lambert’s Women in Protest shows the faces of many European-looking women under a striped red, white and blue flag. Leif Kristian Freed produced one of several abstract pieces in his Just a Kiss, mixed media on paper. Paul Clancy’s inkjet print, Bad Habits and New Year’s Resolutions, is a manipulated photo of a cup and cigarettes.
The show runs until Jan. 29 at the Doris Crowston Gallery, in the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre, 5714 Medusa St., Sechelt. Gallery hours are Wednesday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m. Phone 604-885-5412 or see www.sunshinecoastartscouncil.com
