December 2010

Krystyna Laycraft’s photographs are currently part of a group show at Artpoint Gallery. There are forty-nine of them, some 20.3 cm square and others 25.5 cm square. There are also two larger mother-and-child portraits.
Along with the work of ceramicist Connie Pike, the photos are in one of three show rooms, and they fall under the title Celebration of Art and Life.
Krystyna’s show is the family album writ large. Winsome children, one of them recovering from an illness, are shown in the snapshots. They represent life.
They are all well presented pictures. But lurking behind the charm of the youngsters was a question - can such personal mementos become art when shown in a gallery?
Yes. To be presented as art in an art setting makes them so. They will be judged as such. The problem is they might not be assigned a high degree of “artiness,” except, perhaps, for a few. The mother and child portraits in particular did seem to be firmly within the art category. And why? Because they seemed to symbolize the universal Mother and Child. The pictures were not just snapshots of Lisa and Timmy (or whomever) caught in unrehearsed activity.

And yet so much of recent art has been of that kind - the artist in effect saying, watch me I am doing so and so; now I will do so and so; watch me —-. In short, “I myself am really the work of art and anything I do is of vast significance.”
So why does it not quite work when the family album is pulled out? Especially when kids are involved? I am not sure but I think it is because for all of us, OUR kids are at the top of the totem pole. The fierce biological need to “privilege”, or protect, our own children or grandchildren might make it a wee bit difficult for some of us to see the general in the particular when represented by your young’uns.
That would not be the case if ten or so unrelated children had been photographed. It would then have sidestepped the personal. The thing is —- oh, oh —- I am about to get myself into deep doo doo here —- the problem, as I see it, is that it takes courage, or a towering ego, to assign universal significance to every fleeting emotion expressed by one’s own children or grandchildren.

Actually, come to think of it, maybe the above musings do not really apply. Ah well. Maybe it is simply about the radiant space Krystyna Laycraft inhabits.
We are all in that same space to some degree, aren’t we? A bit like Coconut Joe - a legend in his own mind - and what’s wrong with that?
Anyway, what I have said is probably a minority view. A minority of one.

Respectfully submitted,
Vernon Aquart

* There is more of a general nature about Kristyna’s past shows at Artpoint...

The first time I saw Krystyna’s work, some years ago, I was puzzled. Superficially it appeared to show a fascination with contorted, “romantic”, images of nature, and with broad themes such as love, pleasure, power, expressed within a personal symbology.
As well, some of the paintings incorporated I Ching symbols. The I Ching, as I understand it, is a system for diagnosing a person’s strengths or weaknesses, thus allowing them to deflect the trajectory of their lives into the most manageable pathways and thereby reach a desired goal. It is based on the 64 possible permutations of a hexagram consisting of solid or broken lines, to which meaning has been assigned.

Here are a few of them, copied from the net -

HEXAGRAM:        MODERN INTERPRETATIONS:
||||||     Possessing Creative Power & Skill. Strength. 

¦¦¦¦¦¦     Needing Knowledge & Skill; Do not force matters and go with the flow.     Receptive.

|¦¦¦|¦     Sprouting. Initial Difficulties.

¦|¦¦¦|     Detained, Enveloped and Inexperienced. Youthful Inexperience.


On some of Krystyna’s otherwise representational paintings, there were also spiraling or sinuous lines or patterns of dots the significance of which I hadn’t the foggiest idea.

So what was Mrs. Laycraft saying? Was there a certain mysticism there?
So I looked up her website on the net.
I discovered that Krystyna is a theoretical physicist hailing from Poland, who also studied art in Calgary, and that her scientific focus is on Chaos Theory.
What the hell is that I wondered.
So I looked it up on the net.
Below, from my limited understanding, are the basics of Chaos Theory - a few key terms which, of necessity, I have described in simplistic, non scientific terms -

Attractors
A tennis ball rolling over a lawn rolls into a depression (the basin of attraction). It will continue to roll until it comes to rest at the lowest point. The lowest point is the attractor.
(The ball might corkscrew around the basin rather than follow a straight line).
In some cases, the lowest point might not be fixed, as it is for eddies in a stream.
Such a basin of attraction is called a strange attractor.

Bifurcation Points
Using the same analogy, as in the first example above, if the ball approaches an uneven field of pebbles before reaching the depression, it will “hesitate” before bumping one and be deflected. This small change in its trajectory might result in a huge change in its path until it enters a different basin of attraction.
(note: the analogy of a basin is somewhat misleading because the ball needs to somehow emerge from it, after a while, and continue its constantly bifurcated progress towards ever more complex basins of attraction, where the weave and fabric of the ball itself will be more and more elegantly defined (as with fractals)).
 
Fractals
A fractal is a geometric shape that can be split into increasingly smaller parts, each of which is, more or less, a reduced-size copy of the whole.

                        
 
Wikipedia: “Describing the attractors of chaotic dynamical systems has been one of the achievements of chaos theory.”
But WHOA!
                     WHOA! WHOA! WHOA.
What does all this have to do with art?
In a way, a great deal. This kind of thing - this vaster dimension - in a painting (or other art form) reduces the discomfort many artists feel towards their “practice”.
How can someone with a masters degree in fine art devote him/herself to what might be considered craft?
No way. The physical object, if any, has to be a mere signifier or vehicle for the relentlessly reexamined and provisional idea. The art is the concept “Art”, or the historical, philosophical etc. musings it engenders. That is the postmodern way.

In a New Yorker cartoon of some years ago (I don’t remember it exactly), two men are looking at a squiggle on a gallery wall. One is a bit nonplussed. The other tells him that the object on the wall is merely a trigger for a pondering process about art. Perhaps about the human condition. Therefore, whatever either one thinks is equally valid even if quite different.
And “Art”, like poetry, became a special interest affair. Or a fiesta as at the biennials now sprouting up everywhere.

However, in those byways where art thrives, the 21st century has seen a resurgence of figuration along with art as a primarily conceptual affair. There is more representational painting being produced today than ever before, even if there is little chance of any of it achieving genuine celebrity status in this age of the Blackberry and Face Book.

Which is fine. Post-postmodern multiplicity still reigns.
I mention all this because, in the west, painting today retains two 20th century characteristics - a penchant for “expressive”, cursory brushstrokes (or pencil lines or whatever) and, at the same time, an anxiety to imbue the work with intellectual significance.

Which brings me back to Krystyna Laycraft. Can the exploration in paint of a mathematical/scientific/philosophical system be art?  Why not? Art very often has such non aesthetic underpinnings.  Krystyna said (among other things): 

“I opened myself to a variety of experiences by revisiting familiar places and new (countries) and by attending scientific conferences. Some events, exhibitions, talks and images caught my attention and become the bifurcation points of my creation. In my art work, I examine people’s actions which usually draw towards the six chaotic attractors: freedom, love, pleasure, power, knowledge and longevity.” (My italics).

It seems to me that art allowed Krystyna to illustrate the quality (for want of a better word) of chaotic activity about which she is most passionate. Not activity in the human psyche so much as in the more unfettered human spirit: how to use its bifurcation points and its attractors to achieve what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “… the rise, the roll, the carol, the creation…” (even if those words were written in a far more pessimistic frame of mind).

Krystyna Laycraft’s art is not about art. It is a symbolic language about self empowerment….. Birds in soaring flight. Resistant gnarled trees. Children as a human future assured. Representations of the pull of attractors.
A moral agenda.
Or so it seems to me.
So is Krystyna walking a fine line between inspiring homilies and art?
I don’t know.
I will not try to criticize in depth. I am not equipped to do so.
But if what I have said is way off the mark, I urge you to correct me.

Respectfully submitted,
Vernon Aquart

Reviewed by Josiah Bob Taundi

Artpoint’s Main Gallery presents Looking for Balance Between Skin and Soul, a fantastic exhibition of new, crisp multi-themed paintings that utterly delights the eye, invoke laughter and raise curiosity about the world of Calgary artist, Ferdinando “Fred” Spina.

A written and spoken word artist too, Spina read some of his interesting new poems and short stories on the opening night.

With a published book of poems and paintings, “Arctic Notes and Prairie Places,” Spina’s poems and short stories intermingle with his paintings, each art borrowing from another.  

His paintings anything from imagination to reality, from expansive Prairie and Arctic cities to the not-so-real Red cities, dogs, people to erotica.

Spina is a globetrotter. He has travelled to many cities and places across all continents of the earth. He says travel gives him a fresh perspective that help extricate himself from the mundane familiarity that blinds us from the recognizing peculiarities of our everyday situations or surroundings.

He gets ideas from anywhere, he says, his poems, travels, just driving across the street and by entertaining different ideas. Many artists do some of this too.

However, Spina goes furthest, drawing inspiration from another deeper well. He is able to go into a certain state of mind many us never knew existed, let alone exploited to create art.

There’s a conspicuous recurrence of a red house and a red city, for example, teeming with people and pets that runs through the entire body of work. It evokes a yearning in us to visit those places. But, as it turns out, those red places are, unfortunately, unphysical and unreachable.

“The Red City is something I see between when I’m asleep or awake. It’s more solid than a dream but less solid than reality,” Spina explains.

His paintings are also wickedly humorous, with names that are more of explanations than titles.

They are often lengthy and ridiculously self-explanatory, if not child-like. “Two Dogs And A Cat Walking Past People I Have Known In The Red City” depicts exactly that, so is “Two Circus Dogs Practising Their Act While Watching A Plane From The Cloud” or “Three Birds And Snake After Lunch” depicting an actual snake slithering past a red house in a lush neighbourhood while two birds are flying past overheard!

Heightened curiosity grips the viewer on yet another another piece “Two Men Approaching A Building Where Women Are Living At Large” actually showing at least 23 beautiful women of all kinds – some nude – ogling two young men passing by. Oddly, the men seem to be moving away, not towards the building.

The travels and adventures of Spina - a social worker by profession – comes alive in his pictures of lives of First Nations communities of the Arctic north, like “Big Inuit City.”

He also has a revisionist piece “Memories of Birmingham Alabama, 1963” he says was a result of his visit to the US shortly after President JF Kennedy’s historic assassination.This was also during the troubling times of the civil rights movement.

The painting depicts a group of black and white people separately waiting for a bus at the same bus stop. Blacks are in front of Big Joe’s store where “shoes for feet” are being sold while whites are on the Best Buy Clothes store side.

It’s a serious, symbolic signs of the times, that proves Spina also larger than his humour.

More information about Spina’s art can be seen on his website http://spinaart.blogspot.com  

• Looking For Balance Between Skin And Soul is running from May 7th till May 31st, 2010 at Artpoint’s Main Gallery

Ferdinando (Fred) Spina “Two Men Approaching A Building Where Women Are Living At Large” acrylic on canvas

Ferdinando (Fred) Spina “Memories of Birmingham Alabama” acrylic on canvas

Ferdinando “Fred” Spina “Big Inuit City” acrylic on canvas

Deborah Robinson, Blackening, Acrylic on canvas and Goldleaf, 2010

Deborah Robinson, Rise, Acrylic on canvas, 2010

Deborah Robinson, Vision, Acrylic on canvas, 2010

By Josiah Bob Taundi

Anyone who wants some inner peace should see Vision: An Inner Journey, an exhibition of serene paintings by Deborah Robinson currently showing at Artpoint’s main gallery in Calgary.

Vision is a galore of flowers, landscapes and Oriental religious iconography. The whole mood of the show is enhanced by luxury ethnic Indian drapery adorned in-between and around the paintings, giving the exhibition space a fresh, rich interior decor.

The drapery/painting colour scheme is an art in itself. The ultimate effect makes the viewer feel the freshness of the air between. It’s beautiful.

But the show is not that simple. It’s actually an anti-thesis of common assumptions.

The profoundly catchy paintings Vision, Quan Yin, Rise and Flow of Compassion might easily cast Robinson’s work as religious art.

Vision is a bold statement combining the fluer-de-lis, flowers, some Indian goddess, Mother Mary and Buddha. Such confluence of compassion, piety and regality doesn’t happen in a rational world, more so ours that’s bloated by religious animosities.

Flow of Compassion depicts Buddha in his trademark meditative pose, sitting upon a waterfall in a virgin forest, while Rise show angels in ascension.

It’s easy, therefore, to overlook the other flower and landscape paintings like Extravagance, Passion, Calla or Promenade, River Landscape and Johnson Lake, as variety fillers of a religious art exhibition.

Robinson disputes all that. She explains she is more interested in the principles – not religion – of the Orient. The idea of the Vision show is simply to reveal the spiritual at a more conscious level. A flex of personal power, if you like.

Even her flower paintings, when studied carefully, reveal deeper meanings too. For instance, Lotus Bud depicts a budding flower which, when looked upside down, is in fact a heart. That same bud will bloom to life in Purple Lotus.

Rise challenges us to rethink the process of Ascension, ordinarily understood to be a departure from earth to heaven – terrestrial to celestial.

However, Robinson interprets it as the “rise of human consciousness on earth.”

“We can ascend when we ‘cross over’ but it can be done here on earth,” she points out, adding the painting is also a representation of the feminine power in us all that she says has been ignored for too long – invoking Dan Brown’s take of the feminine in his bestseller, The Da Vinci Code.

Blackening is cut from another cloth. An earlier acrylic on canvas and goldleaf piece, it’s a very hot coloured painting of crows and remnants of buildings. It’s an alchemy. Structures are burnt down in order to purify, much like the “phoenix rising from the ashes,” as the artist puts it. Yet at a common level it could easily be anything like getting rid of systems that are no longer needed, which could be they political, procedural or technological.

The whole Robinson idea is as human as it is common sensical but, above all, it’s art.

A trained musician, she invites us to “enjoy the open spaces, like silence between notes (and) discover your inner relationship to vision.”

More about Robinson’s praxis can be found on her official website www.blumoonart.com

“Vision: An inner Journey” is running from April 9th to April 30th, 2010

By Josiah Bob Taundi

Expressionistic experimentation burst into life in a new exhibition No Explanation! currently running at Artpoint.

It’s the known and unknown of two prominent Calgary artists Jacqulynn Mulyk and Simon Aitchison. Both dared to break away from the comfort zones of their previous work but managed to remain on top of their craft despite the metamorphosis.

Most incredibly, both artists admit they don’t have full explanations of their own pieces!

Mulyk`s famous for her blissful cityscapes and flowers. She has painted many places in and around Calgary, Vancouver, New York and San Francisco, among others. With almost architectural precision and enhanced by collages, the paintings immortalised downtown buildings, cars, trams, parks/gardens, cafes and people – all executed in a riot of colours. (see Mulyk’s website www.burstandbloom.ca) Mixed media Spring Garden, Willingdon and Diversdero Street represents such that older order.

But recent Potatoes and Market Day indicated remarkable progress. Potatoes for instance, is a large acrylic painting of a market place that Mulyk frequents. From afar it appears like an abstract rendition but a closer look shows a very realistic picture of flower pots, wooden crates complete with rusting nails, etc. Colour and form unite in balanced harmony. Its compositional dexterity is perfect.

Her total revolt comes via the spiritual ”Point-Zero” and pyrograph series, essentially products of intuitive painting technique that affords the artist an unexpected outcome through spontaneity as opposed to predetermination. It’s the visual equivalent of the stream of consciousness in literature.

Even Mulyk was surprised with the result and admits she doesn`t have a complete explanation for series. Inadvertently, a motif of an open mouth emerged – consuming cake, snakes or even humans. We are what we eat.

Similar unpredictability recurs in her wooden pyrographs. The Ground is Black for example, is a complex apocalyptic scene of catastrophe, death, blood, despair and helplessness. Initially started as a poem, Mulyk says meaning may be “personal or global – personal problems or disasters like Haiti that we have little control over.”

Quantum science meets art in Simon Aitchison`s work. He questions the origins of life. It’s all so complicated, even the artist himself has a hard time explaining. This is a culmination of Aitchison`s experimentation with abstract expressionism.

Hitherto, for the past 13 years, he progressed from surrealism, figurative to abstract. Working in oil on canvas, Aitchison is a master of texture and detail.

Everything is carefully controlled: colours, tones, shapes, layers and texture. No brush stroke or colour splash accidents are tolerated. In The Hatching, the details become so fine one might need magnifying glasses to fully appreciate Aitchison`s intensity of detail. That closer look will reveal plants germinating into life, something hard to notice with a cursory look.

Only evokes the Big Bang theory, whilst Almost Alone But Not Quite is a large swirling impasto depicting an overwhelming blue sky over brown earth, convincing the viewer, by its sheer magnitude, that we are only micro-chromosomes in an infinite universe.

Incomplete is an almost plain crimson-red piece with occasional dark spots whose finish appears more like polished wooden surface rather than the oil on canvas it actually is, asserting Aitchison`s texture skills. He said the painting is about problems found in relationships.

• No Explanation! is running at Artpoint from March 5th till March 27th, 2010