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

By Josiah Bob Taundi

Through her impressive paintings currently on show for the first time at Artpoint, Calgary artist Nadine Charman invites her audiences to see beyond the objective reality. From nature art, her work radiates further into realms of imagination, surrealism and spiritualism.

Titled Portals and Dreams, this exhibition of recent acrylic and watercolour paintings and an installation inspired by nature and shamanism, viewers are required to free their minds from constrains of their assumptions of what is nature,  religious or surreal art. It’s all or none of these. And more.

55 years old and in her final year of Shamanic studies Charman is also a healer and is quick to admit that it will probably take a lifetime to become a shaman.

Shamans, according Wikipedia, are intermediaries or messengers between the natural world and spirit worlds. They can treat ailments/illness by mending the soul. The shaman is also capable of entering supernatural realms or dimensions in order to obtain answers to the problems of their community, among other attributes.

Charman says she meditates first before painting and it’s not surprising therefore that  a spiritual mosaic runs through the entire body of work. She calls her approach “intuition painting” in which the outcome of the painting is a result of  personal idiosyncrasies rather than a true depiction the real world. The result is magical.

Her art on show can be put into three distinct categories. The first  consists of landscape pieces that she describes as “little bits of joy and energy.” The second is made up of medium-sized paintings  of a very spiritual and symbolic nature and are probably the soul of the show. The third series is composed large nature paintings.

A longtime University of Calgary printmaking graduate, the soft-spoken artist has a very personal approach to her art and is mindful to leave her work open-ended so it doesn’t get mired in dogma and didactic pitfalls.

Referring to the second series she said: “I did not want to title them to make it easier for people to follow. People are different and I wanted them to make their own interpretations unbound by the complexities of shamanism.”

The spiritual and natural world merge. Female spirits may lurk inside virgin forests. Landscapes are sacred.  It’s all a make-believe world of ecstasy and lucid dreams.

A recent trip south to Peru inspired most of her work, particularly the second series. She and her fellow students went on a spiritual journey learning more about “The Medicine Wheel” and participated in “earth count ceremonies.”

Charman says the “Medicine Wheel” refers to all the numbers in the show like one is the Sun, two is the Earth, etc.and the “Earth Count” refers to the type of medicine wheel that inspired her paintings. There are many different kinds of “medicine wheels” in Shamanism.

The message behind the paintings is however easier to access if one starts from an installation in the form of a campus. It consists of 21 (0-20) carefully positioned stones, each corresponding to each painting in the series. The stones are all members of the “earth count,” a fundamental aspect of shamanic studies. Each rock is a cardinal point of the campus installation further explained by a framed diagrammatic drawing on show whose markings and words explains the meaning of each rock and, by extension, each painting. The drawing acts as a key to all paintings that are all numbered but untitled leaving them very open to varied interpretations, depending on the viewer.

Indeed, her paintings have that double effect of being beautiful art that can be bought for its aesthetic value or, alternatively, spiritual symbolism.

Otherwise fewer people would understand the meaning of “earth count” concepts like “the collective spirit of animals/sweet medicine on the North, or the collective spirits of all plants/the white buffalo woman on the South, let alone entire campus.

Her larger works in the third series are landscapes and seascapes like Portals and Dreams, The Journey or The Passionate Sea, that she explained were not really on-the-spot places but rather a merging of different places she has been to.

“I am interested in memories and dreams,” she said.

It is rather odd that animals were only represented once in painting Seven, in the entire exhibition  when animals very fundamental in shamanic traditions considered carriers of the human soul to heaven  or underground during a trance.

“I have a personal collection of animal art but I did not like to include in the show,” she admits.

Apart from painting Charman is a puppetry artist and holds performances in Calgary. Her puppets are usually animal characters.

ENDS.