The pictorial bestiary on display at The Kube gallery in Gibsons does more than transport its backwoods subjects into the urban world of their human spectators. The wildlife paintings of Roberts Creek-based artist Kandice Keith suggest that each creature carries a message — gleeful, droll, provocative or portentous.
Keith’s current exhibition — Matted Menagerie: An Exploration of Colour and Luminosity — follows a previous show at The Kube in September 2020. Owing to COVID exigencies, it started without ceremony.
The reception to open her present Kube showcase, on March 7, was a colourful counterpoint: crowds continued to fill the uptown storefront two hours after its official start. “This is my first ever solo opening as an artist in over 20 years,” said Keith. “I’ve done other solo shows here on the Coast, and joined with other people, but I’ve never had a solo opening before.”
The show also comes close to marking the quarter-century mark since Keith first enrolled in an acrylic painting class and transformed her longtime love of the natural environment into painterly landscapes inspired by the Group of Seven.
Since then, Keith has developed a distinctive style that — even in the tree- and floral-dominated images she creates when not depicting fauna — forces the subject to the foreground, filling and overflowing the frame. The long-limbed owl of Wally looks startled by the visitor’s gaze, its yellow-ringed eyes comically wide. Meanwhile, the frog in Francois seems to be caught in a moment of dozy rumination. Each is backed by a vivid, solid colour. The effect of their immediacy is mesmerizing: each encounter evokes a silent conversation.
The magic is by design. “I’ve always painted stuff with a really shiny finish,” said Keith. During a visit to the Painted Lady Art Supplies shop, staff introduced her to a particular brand of matte paint. “I used it in the acrylic and it was kind of a gradual process where I learned to love the idea of creating contrast, by having a flat background then seeing how I could play with the shine that I do in my normal process,” she explained. The result gives the uncanny impression of three dimensions, and prompted the luminosity of the series’s title.
The animals themselves are inspired by visitors to Keith’s backyard behind her studio, which is surrounded by dense forest. Upon moving to the Sunshine Coast, the first creature she noticed was ravens. Two of them face off, beak to beak, in her pink-tinted Johnny & June. Nearby, Rosa — its feathers infused with the carmine backdrop — perches in profile, studying the world through a pensive eye outlined in white. A chorus of frogs serenades her at night; chickens, owls and bears amble through. (Burt, her depiction of a self-satisfied black bear, reminds her of Burt Reynolds’s 1972 Cosmopolitan centrefold, in which the actor reclined nude and decadently hirsute atop an ursine rug.)
“I started a lot of this series in January,” she said, “and I wanted to try to push myself out of my comfort zone for The Kube’s contemporary, bold environment. And it was right after the Trump inauguration, so if there was ever a time that I thought we needed bold colours to bring some vibrancy back into our lives, this was it.”
Kandice Keith’s Matted Menagerie continues at The Kube until March 31. She maintains a website at kandicekeith.ca that supports her personal artistic mission: “to make people feel an immediate connection to my work and bring joy and happiness to their homes.”
