No doubt about it – Kim LaFave likes boats. He’s always liked them. The Roberts Creek artist pulls out a stash of drawings and water colours dating back to his art school days and there they are: fishing boats and other vessels at harbour. He once raced sailboats and to this day likes to run little laser boats out on Porpoise Bay on a breezy day.
But for his new show at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery (GPAG) titled Safe Harbours, opening in early June, he has painted a series of acrylics that look at boats in an entirely new way. First, the colours are striking, with a predominance of aqua, cherry red and a touch of yellow. His models are mainly working boats painted from photos taken at Steveston or Gibsons marinas, and they are not always pretty. LaFave’s keen eye has pulled out detail from the boats: a portion of the bow in one painting or a patch of hull with a brightly coloured hanging fender. Secondly, he has played with scale, often painting two of the same image but at different sizes and scales. After a while staring at the images, they seem to evolve from distinct parts of boats into graphic shapes.
LaFave says that he couldn’t call himself an abstract artist, but these graphic qualities are the closest to abstract he is likely to get. He is friends with many other well-known artists on the Coast.
“I admire Josefa [Barham], Greta [Guzek], Cindy [Riach] when they paint water and reflections in their harbour paintings. I don’t see the water. I see the hardware and how it’s all put together.”
Sometimes he has used sanding and scraping to lend texture to these works.
“It suits the subject,” he points out. “Those old boat hulls have been painted and scraped so many times.”
Why fishing boats particularly? He first became interested in this type of boat when he was the illustrator for the Governor General’s award-nominated Gubby books that he worked on with fisherman Gary Kent (Fishing with Gubby, Harbour Publishing, 2010). The details had to be technically accurate for his cartoon drawings, and LaFave took many photos for future use.
He has set himself a big challenge, literally, with one of the paintings for the show. It is two metres by almost four metres – that’s large. It has been divided into segments that can be dissembled and reassembled on site and each segment is a square. (“I’m working a lot in squares – it’s a terrible proportion to work in,” LaFave says.) Each segment seems to stand alone but overall the bigger picture is a depiction of the Keythera to be seen mooring in Gibsons.
LaFave lives with his artist wife Carol LaFave, who will also be showing her latest work at the Warehouse Show, opening on June 3. Though the two do not collaborate on work, they are supportive of each other.
Kim LaFave’s exhibition opens on June 2 with a reception on Saturday, June 4. The GPAG is at 431 Marine Dr. in Gibsons. Find out more on their website at www.gpag.ca
