‘Lake Basins’ Torrents Back

Considered the chief platform for the arts from ‘Lake District’ Kenya, the Western and Nyanza region that is, the annual Lake Basins Art Exhibition is on its way back.  For the fourth time in a row, tradition, legend and myth will fuse together in one pause as artists from Kisumu and its neighbouring settlements use paint to explore cultural folklore.

                                                                                        Bicycles by Patrick Adoyo

Kisumu, a port city originally named Port Florence, was founded in 1901 as the head terminal of the Uganda Railway. The name Kisumu comes from the Luo word “sumo,” which means a place of barter. Mass producers of sugar and rice, and rich in many natural resources, Kisumu’s contribution to the national economy is wide-ranging.

In fact, it’s currently one of the fastest growing cities in Kenya. You might not know too much about Kisumu’s history and that’s probably because in Kenya, people have a tendency to be Nairobi-centric. Most exchanges revolve around the capital’s axis and urbanites often neglect the affairs of neighbouring townships. 

The Lake Basins Art Group is an institution that uses art to develop the wealth of an impoverished district. LBAG showcases many disadvantaged artists from the politically and economically marginalized regions of Western Kenya. With the scenic waters of Lake Victoria to enthuse the artists, the works are full of that village charm us urbanized Nairobians often miss.

If you were there last year, you might remember Jimmy Rakuru’s Fisherman, the celebrated hatted man holding his catch of the day. It captured the essence of rustic life at the lake scene. It had that minimalistic rural feel, very down-to-earth yet almost transcendent.

Inevitably, as years go by, art from the locality changes and many of us are waiting in anticipation for this year’s eye-catchers. Will more pieces have this surreal contradictory feel? What kind of subject matter will the new and guest artists exhibit? What will the member artists produce? We look forward to seeing affiliated artists David Otieno, Edward Orato, Edwin Ochieng, Samuel Olweru, Meshak Odera, Jackson Juma, Willis Otieno and Peko again this year.  

Speaking with Patrick Adoyo, the curator and chairman of LBAG, he’s very excited about this year’s exhibition. “LBAG is a non-profit making community based organization,” he explains and, “many of the exhibiting artists have never gone to school for art or been influenced by tourism and commercial life".

He continues, "Some of them didn’t even know they could make a living this way. Our goal is support artists from those municipalities as many of them have a really tough time. This is my home town and I’ve witnessed their plight firsthand.

He has a smirk on his face as he says he’s on leave for a little while over the next week. It seems strange timing and there’s definitely something hush-hush about his expression. When probed a little further, Adoyo, who’s also an exhibition designer, reveals some painted canvases behind his desk at the National Museum of Kenya

With his background, it doesn’t seem surprising. He’s the head of the Exhibits Section at the Museum and naturally, there might be some artwork about.  In truth, it turns out that the paintings are his. Let me rephrase, he’s the artist!

                                                                      Detail from Market Day by Partick Adoyo Milenye

Yes, pushed to uncover the reason behind his furtive smile, it turns out he’s taking a short timeout to produce a painting or two for this month’s show. Some time ago, Adoyo’s oil and acrylic paintings had made it to exhibitions in London and Italy.

Known in the past primarily for his human figure models made of plasticine and cast in fibreglass and resin, Adoyo is in fact a well-known artist. These days there’s a long stretch between paintings of course but he’s once again inspired. As he pulls out Market Day, a lively painting of a Kenyan souk, he talks about his ardour for art. “I have participated in all of The Lake Basins Exhibitions,” he says proudly.  

Adoyo’s enthusiasm for art means he still puts his personal touch in to each of the Lake Basin Exhibitions. He’s passionate about what he does and genuinely enjoys being a contributing artist of the more silent kind. Look for his paintings amongst the lake painters.

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The difference is in the fine details

Heather Straka's The Asian presents a single original work, as copied by 50 different Chinese artists, to striking effect.

Large collections of similar things have a certain fascination. Te Tuhi Gallery in Pakuranga, now part of the galleries of the Super City, has three shows that are all collections of similarities.

Dominating the main gallery is a work conceived by Heather Straka. She is well known as a painter of elegantly smooth images that combine glamour with inter-racial imagery, as well as studies of things as varied as high-heeled shoes and pieces of human anatomy from the dissecting room.

Here she is dissecting the copying process. While she was in China she visited a village devoted to copying Western art masterpieces. She had a painting of a glamorous Asian woman, with a flower in her hair that drips tears, leaning her gloved hand on a post with a symbolic anchor and a Maori tiki on her sweater, copied by 50 different artists.

The image, ultimately derived from an advertising poster, is a typical Straka ironic comment. The smooth, highly finished style of the painting lends itself to copying. The artists worked from a printed basic outline.

The whole project is on display as three ranks of 20 paintings. Somewhere buried in the rows is the original. The installation makes a strong immediate impact. Then there is the pleasure of letting the eye roam the rows noting slight differences such as lip colour and tones in the sky background.

Besides being so visually potent, the installation says something about Chinese attitudes to Western art and the fact that the comment is made by use of an inter-racial image makes it even more piquant.

In adjacent rooms is a collection of objects all made of gorse wood. They are the work of Regan Gentry from the time he was the William Hodges Artist in Residence in Invercargill. The installation is made lively by a cultivated eccentricity. Gentry has made a video of the rough tracks he struggled through to get at large, old gorse. The sound track is mostly heavy breathing.

The pieces are almost craftlike, though the oddity is in line with his previous work such as making a satiric arch of tyres in a parking space where a fine old theatre was pulled down.

Gorse wood is tough and twisted, with a dark patchy grain, and must be hell to work with. Gentry has made it into a lavatory bowl and seat, a chopping block with an axe and chopper, into rakes and a musket, a cradle called Old Man Nurse and a yard-stick named Ruler of the Paddock.

The whole is a comment on how "gorse has become synonymous with a colonial [Pakeha] vision of New Zealand that sought to break, shape and recreate the land" (from Aaron Kreisler in the accompanying booklet). The danger is that the theme can get lost in amusement at the sheer quirkiness of the objects.

The third collection, WK: 422, by Bill Riley, is a sculptural work in the foyer made from stacks of 5000 hand-painted sheets of recycled cardboard. The edges make abstract lines of colour reminiscent of the artist's paintings.

The arrangement suggests a model cityscape. It makes a lively, temporary installation that exactly suits the surroundings.

Equally lively but more consciously an artistic series are the groups of photographs by Bill Culbert at the Sue Crockford Gallery. Culbert has long been preoccupied with sunlight and artificial light. This show is called Light Levels. On two of the walls superb colour photographs of wrecked and useless wooden crates are transformed by light. He has taken damaged crates from the rubbish tip where he lives in the south of France, then used light to illuminate the grain of the wood. The result is an infinite number of shades of brown, a variety of textures, a sense of long use and the nature of simple constructions.

The battered structures throw dark shadows that read as great, ruined arches or, in Crate 14 XIV, a perspective view of a solemn temple. Every photo has its own quality but as an ensemble they are symphonic.

The second part of the show uses Culbert's trademark fluorescent tubes. These are placed across old window frames at various heights. The glass is still in the windows and against a white wall; viewers and the reality of what is behind them are reflected as shadows, outdone by the bright artificial reality of the tube. This is Culbert, the manipulator of light at his most characteristic.

Simon Ingram in his show Radio Painting at Gow Langsford repeats again and again plain forms within each work as individual patterns. These oils on canvas are painted by machines. In his previous show the machines were much in evidence, working in the gallery. The exhibition was interesting because of the movement of the rather awkward machines, rather than the product of their painting. This show is much more sophisticated and the results are highly effective abstract painting.

To say that the works are done by machine is something of a misnomer. The artist has devised the programmes the machine obeys. His initial material is recordings of low frequency radio transmissions by radio telescope. The rhythms are computerised into programs that control the painting of individual works. A special feature is the nature of the brush strokes the machine has been programmed to make. When the machine pauses, the brushstroke thickens.

The programming ensures these thickenings can be painted rank on rank. This regularity can produce a spectacular regular abstract image and there are two such works: Krasnodar and Ebino (the names are taken from transmitting stations). Yet the paint is not so absolutely regular that it seems as totally mechanical as a commercial or woven fabric according to a computer program.

In other paintings the strokes, vertical or horizontal, stop and start in unison, then suddenly and most effectively break into curved or peaked forms generally near the top. These forms show regular curves, but turn in different directions and in different ways.

The result adds an extraordinary energy to works like Matotchkinchar. This indicates that these abstractions produced by whatever technology can initiate a distinctly emotional human response. The process as well as the product make this a remarkable show.

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A Fiercely Gifted Artist

"She was a piece of work!" the critic Irving Sandler told me on learning of Patricia Albers's biography of the abstract painter Joan Mitchell (1925-92). This appraisal, from the first critical champion of her work, is among the most restrained comments you'll hear about this famously abrasive, famously foul-mouthed artist. Some people genuinely liked and admired Mitchell, but many, according to Ms. Albers, found her "grossly insensitive" and worse.

The artist's older sister blamed her sibling's "indescribable rudeness" for a near-permanent rift between them. A life-long friend described Mitchell as "meanspirited, grotesque, and humorless." A colleague recalled that battling was her "favorite form of entertainment," and one of her psychoanalysts described her as acting "like a baby who falls into a rage." Ms. Albers supports such observations with examples of appalling behavior and, occasionally, physical violence. New York neighbors, we are told, were once startled by the "fearsome sounds" of Mitchell and her lover of the time, the painter Michael Goldberg, "trying to kill each other," while friends were astonished "when she turned up . . . with bruises and black eyes half-concealed by sunglasses

Joan Mitchell in 1957, the year critic Irving Sandler called her 'one of America's most brilliant Action-Painters.'

Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter

Ms. Albers sees this aggressiveness as Mitchell's challenge to the sexism of the 1950s New York art world in which she, along with Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hartigan, was striving to establish herself as an artist to be reckoned with. As "second-generation Abstract Expressionists," these three women arrived after a group of hard-drinking, argumentative, chest-beating male artists. The response of the fiercely intelligent, well-educated Mitchell, Ms. Albers suggests, was to be as argumentative, hard-drinking and promiscuous as the guys.

The biography's title, "Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter," reflects Mitchell's own ironic usage of that phrase. (Mitchell was not a notable supporter of other women artists, however; despite having a similarly affluent background, she was contemptuous of Frankenthaler as "a rich girl.") Ms. Albers suggests that painting was Mitchell's defense against her private demons (she once said that life went "along fine when I'm painting and then afterwards the bottom drops out of things"). Acting badly was her defense against everything else.

As a rapturous fan of Mitchell's landscape-informed, calligraphic, intensely colored abstractions, Ms. 8Albers is willing to forgive a lot. To illuminate her subject's psyche, she offers a vast amount of information about Mitchell's early life, as the younger daughter of a socially prominent Chicago family, and her education at the Frances Parker School, Smith College (briefly) and the Art Institute of Chicago. We meet Mitchell's parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. (Her wealthy engineer grandfather and poet/editor mother are the most interesting.) Ms. Albers suggests that Mitchell's father was never satisfied by anything his daughter did, starting with her failure to be a boy.

Ms. Albers traces the source of Mitchell's art not to her upbringing but to certain supposed gifts in which the author believes implicitly. Mitchell described experiencing synesthesia (the ability to "hear" colors) as well as eidetic memory (total visual recall), but just how these attributes affected her painting remains unclear. Consider the link between Mitchell's visual memory and her work: It's obvious that her paintings are in some way informed by particular places, flowers, trees, times of day, qualities of light and—according to Ms. Albers—recollections of Great Lakes storms from her childhood in Chicago. But that is not the end of the story.

Mitchell often said she needed to "feel" a painting to work, ideally in a state of obliviousness to self—a condition sought by many artists and heightened, in Mitchell's case, by consuming alcohol and playing music. Mr. Sandler described her as attempting "to recreate both the recalled landscape and the frame of mind she was in originally." She was not simply transcribing remembered images.

Ms. Albers's book is not the place to turn for an understanding of art. It is punctuated with extended, over-written and yet imprecise descriptions of paintings that fail to evoke particular images despite the self-consciously "vivid" prose and lists of colors. A discussion of "the gorgeous Canada paintings," made in 1974, is typical. "The diptych Canada V beguiles with its bosky masses, its incantatory lights and darks, its use of white around the cut between its two panels, and its oddly right colors (pale mint, white claret, and the color of night)."

Ms. Albers seems more fascinated by Mitchell's sex life than by her art, itemizing her turbulent relationships with Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset (whom she briefly married), the painters Michael Goldberg, Sam Francis and Jean-Paul Riopelle (for whom she permanently abandoned the U.S. for France), Samuel Beckett, and the composer David Amram, among others. We are presented with everything from one-night stands to Mitchell's 24-year liaison with Riopelle, along with the concomitant drunken screaming matches, black eyes and artistic competitiveness. Episodes of Sturm und Drang alternate with florid descriptions of paintings and accounts of Mitchell's relationships with people she didn't sleep with, such as Frank O'Hara and other poets of the New York School. Ms. Albers also tries to demonstrate Mitchell's "capacity for generous friendship," although the supporting examples would just be normal behavior for anyone else.

Ms. Albers explains attractions and aesthetic influences in terms of high-flown parallels. Mitchell's images are equated with O'Hara's and Beckett's use of language. Even her pain-racked but productive last years and death, at 66, from cancer, are compared with the last days of the 18th-century master Antoine Watteau, who painted one of his finest works, a crowded scene of an art dealer's shop, just before dying of tuberculosis.

That Mitchell was difficult, willful and frequently unpleasant to be around emerges all too clearly from Ms. Albers's chronicle. That she was a serious painter who, as she told Mr. Sandler, aimed at "achieving accuracy and intensity" in her work also comes through, despite the overwrought descriptions that substitute for analysis. As for accuracy, Ms. Albers is plainly a thorough researcher, yet assertions that Mitchell's grandfather had "a clotted cream" complexion or that Mitchell "visibly flinched" when a paintbrush dripped seem questionable. "Intensity" is largely embodied by the verbs assigned to Mitchell: She "adores," "worships," "is wild for." But Ms. Albers fails to capture the intensity of Mitchell's art. This tough-minded, gifted woman deserves a better book.

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A mother's masterpiece

Katerina Mertikas (R), her daughter Gina Mertikas (L), who is expecting her second child, and her 10-month-old daughter (C), also named Katerina, show off some of their art they both have painted in Katerina's home on April 20, 2011.

When 10-month-old Katerina Lavictoire decides to pick up a paintbrush for the first time, her mother would be well advised to save that first painting — there’s a good possibility the little girl could be a famous artist one day.

Artistic talent tends to run in the family, after all. As the daughter of emerging Ottawa artist Gina Mertikas and the namesake and granddaughter of well-loved and celebrated painter Katerina Mertikas, baby Katerina could make for a third generation of artists.

Sunday will mark Gina’s first Mother’s Day with her daughter. And she will also use the occasion to toast her own mom’s strong influence in her life.

“My mother’s art is completely different than mine,” reflects Gina. “But I really think that her career has paved the way for my own success.”

Inspired by the birth of her sister’s son, Gina began painting in 2005. Her first piece featured a truck for her nephew’s bedroom wall. Her sister loved it, as did both women’s friends.

Soon, specific requests began to pour in for Gina’s cheerful children’s art — and her repertoire grew to include princess dresses, flowers, jungles and space scenes.

“I do a lot of personalized art for kids,” says Gina, 28, who displays her acrylic creations at the Ottawa Greek Festival every summer and sells selected works at Sleepy Hollow. “I always like to see what will brighten up a little child’s room.”

Now drawing inspiration from her own daughter — and with her second child due to arrive this summer — Gina says she would love to stay at home and paint while her children are young.

“It’s not yet my full-time job,” says Gina, who works for the office of the minister of Foreign Affairs. “But the community has taken a great liking to my work. I’m beginning to have a small fan following.”

In fact, she just launched a new site, peekabookidsart.com, to further market her artistic work for children. For those seeking contemporary pieces, Gina also creates abstract acrylic art (ginamertikas.com) that starts at about $250.

“I really enjoy creating abstract pieces for people’s homes,” she says. “I like to go in and see the space and visualize what would work best.”

Gina’s eye for colour and design must be somewhat innate, considering her mother Katerina has been painting since before Gina was born. “In my earliest memories of my mom, she always had paint all over her hands,” recalls Gina.

Katerina admits to rushing between school plays and other activities involving Gina and her sister Loukia in order to get back to her passion. “If I’m not painting, I’m just itching,” she says. Though she was passionate about art since her childhood, she didn’t pursue art seriously until she was 33.

“I would paint at home after I came back from work, with no encouragement from anyone,” says Katerina, who worked as a medical secretary for the University of Ottawa Heart Institute for three years. “When I look back at my diaries from those years, I would constantly write, ‘I will be an artist, I will be an artist.’ ”

It was Dr. Wilbert Keon — the renowned heart surgeon who founded the institute — who stopped her one day after catching her making some colour adjustments to a painting already hanging on the wall.

“He said, ‘Katerina, what are you doing here? Go home and fulfil your passion,’ ” she says. “But it was a big chance to take — to leave my job and pursue art.”

Fortunately, she did take the leap — and she hasn’t looked back. Her success was immediate and impressive; her first art show, held in Montreal in 1991, sold a stunning 80 paintings. Katerina attributes her success to the style of her work.

“Mine is not a fad-ish type of art,” she explains. “I think 80 per cent of people can relate to it because it’s mostly about memories.

“I’m really well-known for my winter pieces — images of skiing or the street full of children playing and having fun.”

Born in Greece, Katerina is a self-taught artist who immigrated to Canada in 1960. She describes the style of her work as “naive impressionism.” Through her art (katerinamertikas.com), she aims to convey to the world a message of love, peace, innocence and friendship.

“I try to capture the special, happy moments in our daily lives on every canvas I paint,” says Katerina, who is known for her bright, vivid colours.

If Ottawa residents feel that Katerina’s work seems familiar, it may be because it is prominently displayed at the various campuses of the Ottawa Hospital, including the neo-natal ward at the Civic and the General, as well as the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO).

Katerina’s work has also been selected by UNICEF and the Canadian Lung Association for cards, stamps and calendars to help raise funds.

While she has been selling her work with Koyman Galleries in Ottawa for nearly 20 years, she also exhibits and sells her pieces in other major galleries across the country.

“I love and respect children and I can’t stand to see them sick or suffering,” says Katerina, who donates to 10 causes per year, including the annual Snowflake Ball in support of the CHEO Foundation.

Last year, a family donated 17 pieces of Katerina’s art to CHEO following the passing of a family member. “My work seems to lend itself to places that need happy, cheerful art to lift one’s spirits.”

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New life for classic creations

 

George Capron carefully brushes away any remaining lint and dust from a recently restored 1933 painting.

When it comes to original paintings, George Capron knows there is more to art than meets the eye.

"Paintings have a life of their own," said Capron, who specializes in art repair, restoration and conservation.

"There is a presence they have about them. Even a painting of Grandpa done by Grandma is a valuable record of time. The paint, condition and style are germane to the era." 

Capron has a master's degree in art from the University of California, Berkeley and taught studio courses at the college level as well as attaining a lifetime teaching credential for the state of California University System. Even though he is retired from teaching, the active Alta resident stays busy volunteering as a docent for the Crocker Art Museum and running his home based art restoration business. 

“People were always bringing me something to fix,” said Capron.

He first started researching art restoration pieces over 35 years ago. “One day a woman brought me a painting of Venice. Her son had burned a hole in it with a cigarette. I thought I can't just jump into that so I got a lot of books and started doing research. I was able to fix her painting up to a point,” he said. 

That was the moment Capron realized how much he needed to still learn about the specialized art of restoration and repair. 

"It takes focus on the artist, on the materials and on the object itself,” said Capron, a member of the American Institute for Conservation of Artistic and Historic works. “Chemistry is a good background for this business because of the different solvents and materials you working with. Different artists have different techniques in painting. Some are very radical in mixing the art mediums; some take a very purist approach. It is important to know and understand art history to understand the artist’s intent.” 

Conservation in regard to approach a painting involves evaluating and removing it from its harmful and damaging environment to halt the deterioration. The next step is whether or not to pursue restoration, which often includes cleaning. 

Recently Capron was commissioned to work on a family heirloom painted in 1933 by Wayland Adams. “The gold gilded frame needed to be cleaned and carefully antiqued, but one of the main things I did was to take the old varnish off the painting which darkens as it ages, clean the painting, and apply a fresh coat of protective varnish,” he said. 

Each project is unique and can take hours of research prior to beginning the tedious work involved in preserving the original artwork. 

“One of the most violently damaged paintings I did was a sailing ship that involved three-dimensional silk sails. They were tattered and in such disrepair the man’s wife almost threw it away,” Capron explained. “The man asked me if I could save it since it had sentimental value.” 

Capron had to research the techniques used in forming the silk sails and found out that several other conservators had turned down the job due to the difficulty. “He was so happy that he cried when he got it back,” he said. 

A conservator has to be able to distinguish the materials that were available during the time the picture was created, which often limits use of modern supplies. 

“Another project that I took on required several phone calls to museums including Turkey to get the information I needed to begin restoring a wooden icon that was carved and painted in the 1700s,” Capron said. “Wood bores had hollowed it out and the piece was so fragile you could bend it in your hands.” 

Capron learned the animal hide glue was compatible to the historic piece and he carefully sealed the inside with the glue, allowing it to coat the bored-out grain of the historical artifact whicis from Tiblisi, Georgia and is now part of a private collection. 

“I retouched a few places on the face and hand but that was all that I did to the painting. It is very important to maintain the artifact to as close to the original condition as you can, even when it has been worn. There is a code of ethic in maintaining artifacts that include the philosophy of the original creation,” he said. 

When asked who his favorite artist is, Capron laughed, “My 8-year-old granddaughter, Carli!” 

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Art makes a statement without saying a word

Large paintings show off your taste better than wallpaper

 

Lost in the shuffle of buying, building or furnishing that new home is a large blank canvas: your walls.

large blank canvas: your walls. You've already selected and applied your paint colours. You may have added crown moulding. But even with your furniture in place your walls still look empty.

So where do you start? Well, there's wallpaper. Or you could add a mural. If neither rings your bell, consider works of art.

As you dress the interior of your home, fine art or paintings allow you to individualize your home as well as provide an opportunity to show off your taste. Art can also make a cultural statement or even a political one depending on the piece and will likely become a topic of conversation when you're entertaining.

But while there is a perception that original works of art are costly -and yes, some are -the reality is that if you buy art from a reputable art gallery or privately through the artist directly, you're likely to find that there are paintings that will fit into most budgets. You might also find that the works of an up-andcoming artist are exactly what you like and those will likely be reasonably priced.

"The purchase of a painting is like putting a cherry on top of the cake. It's such a welcoming addition to a room," says artist Edward Michell, who specializes in contemporary abstracts. "Art adds elegance and opulence. I always insist that clients buy original paintings, if possible. They're unique. They're one-of-akind and no one else in the world will have the same piece that you have."

The Calgary-based Michell, whose forte is using natural material from the land -Yukon gold and crushed diamonds from Canada, oilsands bitumen for black, greens derived from grass and leaf, or pink paint made from raspberries and beets -says art can create an intimate space and enhances your living space.

"The walls in your home are like a raw canvas. Placing a feature painting on a feature wall can really be a spectacular addition to your home," Michell says.

Feature walls also provide the opportunity for larger, more dramatic pieces, adds fellow artist Jon Havelock, who specializes in artography, digitally enhanced photographic compositions that accentuate the scenic settings he shoots.

"I'm seeing a demand for larger more dramatic pieces," Havelock says.

"In the newer open-concept homes I'm finding fewer but larger walls; this year I haven't produced any work that is 36 inches by 24 inches or smaller. People are looking for something that makes a statement, something that is more dramatic and transforms their walls."

Havelock's scenic compositions take anywhere from 50 to 100 hours to create, using filters, layers and textures to highlight the extraordinary that he says is inherent in the ordinary settings around us. He limits each photographic composition to just five copies, giving these an exclusive touch.

And if Havelock's name sounds familiar, he is the one and the same Tory MLA who represented the riding of Calgary-Shaw in the 1990s and served as Alberta's attorney general and justice minister. Now that he's residing in Edmonton, what initially started as his hobby has become his creative career.

Both Havelock and Michell concur that if you're in the early stages of a new home purchase, you should consider planning your wall space around your art or art that you may be looking at purchasing.

This is important, they say, as newer homes tend to have more window space than wall space, which can limit your display areas.

"It makes sense to plan your home to take the type of art you want to put in," Havelock says. "I don't think much thought is given to the type of art that will go onto the walls (when you're building)."

Michell notes that lighting, too, should be considered when it comes to drawing up plans for a new home. "If you know you're going to have some art, lighting is important, such as directional pot lights over a feature wall. Or if you will have an inset wall, add a power source for a light to highlight the art with the plug to be hidden behind the painting," Michell says.

Most importantly, Havelock and Michell stress that you should buy what you like and buy what you can afford -you wouldn't want the piece to remind you that you shouldn't have spent so much money on it. Buy it, they say, because it makes you feel good and because it enhances your home.

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The art of drawing

In the words of Giorgio Vasari, drawing is the father of three other arts; architecture, sculpture and painting. We can trace drawing back to its appearance as cave paintings, and in modern times, graffiti and basic doodling indicate the urge to draw is alive and kicking.

As people continue to lay more focus on the final product, drawing, the root of all art, seems to have taken a back seat. What we as art critics and enthusiasts have forgotten is the importance of drawing — creating a notion that only a painting can be hung on a wall, and a drawing must be designated to the drawer. We fail to remember that, in the West, the drawings of giants such as Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci are given as much weight as their paintings.

Taking a cue from revered artists around the globe, Khaas Art in association with Aasim Akhtar has taken the initiative to compile portfolio of the drawings of well-known artists. For the first time in Pakistan, notable artists have been asked to compile their drawings in one place. Salima Hashmi, RM Naeem, Tariq Gill, Waseem Ahmed, Anwar Saeed, Nahid Raza, Mehr Afroze, Aasim Akhtar, Naiza Khan, Farrukh Shahab, Moeen Farruqi and Adeel-uz-Zafar will, for the first time, retrace the roots of art and collect an anthology of drawings.

Talking exclusively with The Express Tribune Magazine, Aasim Akhtar, who is also to be featured in the portfolio, speaks about the significance of drawing and the unique nature of this particular venture.

“Never in the history of Pakistan has there been a compilation made of original drawings,” he says. “In a very arbitrary way, the portfolio briefly divides artists by generation. But they are all active practitioners of art and original draughtsman.” Even though the artists have different historical realities they have shared sensibilities; visual and conceptual.

This particular portfolio cherishes the artists’ differences, conflicts and reversals. It is this diversity of vision and approach that makes this collection unique. The artists have not been bound to either theme or medium.

With full flexibility with regard to what the artist might want to produce, the collective sees a collage by Salima Hashmi, drawn washes by Nahid Raza, a self portrait in graphite by Farrukh Shahab and a beautiful piece by Aasim Akhtar in lead pencil. “For the last 25 years I have been struggling with the space between drawing and painting,” says Salima Hashmi. “I like the structure to be exposed and be a part of the finished piece.”

Adeel-uz-Zafar’s unique technique of layering his surface with vinyl coating and helping the image emerge through the surface through scratch marks is inimitable and adds to the uniqueness and exclusivity of the portfolio. “The way I work has a linear quality to it and so it makes sense that I am involved in this project,” says Zafar.

An initiative taken by the late Usman Ghauri to compile a portfolio of screen prints in Karachi under the name ‘Different Drummer’ was the inspirational step that drove Pakistan’s artists to collect other such pieces. With Laila Rehman following lead at NCA in Lahore, Usman Ghauri came out with another portfolio, Out of the Box, before passing away. With a total of four portfolios dedicated to printmaking existing in Pakistan, the fifth portfolio is a huge contribution.

Paul Klee once said, “Drawing is a dot taken on a long walk.” As Khaas Art and Aasim Akhtar join this walk, the original portfolio rests in the Santorine-esque Khaas Art Gallery in Islamabad and will soon be auctioned off and the proceeds from the auction will be donated to the upcoming LRBT Benefit Night in Islamabad.

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Painting Flowers: Fantin-Latour and the Impressionists,

Fruit and Flowers - Fantin-Latour, 1866 

By Richard Dorment 

'In the beginning,” the elderly Edgar Degas recalled, “Fantin, Whistler and I, we were all on the same road from Holland.”

What he meant was that in the early 1860s, just as the moribund polarities in French painting between the neo-classical and Romantic schools were giving way to the full-blooded realism of Gustav Courbet, he was among a band of young artists who aspired to bring up-to-date the Dutch 17th-century landscape, portrait, still life and genre traditions.

One of the artists Degas mentions was Henri Fantin-Latour, painter of that great aubade to the Romantic movement, Homage à Delacroix, the 1864 group portrait in which (among others) Baudelaire, Manet, Whistler and Fantin-Latour himself boldly stake their claim to the leadership of the cultural avant-garde.

Whistler and Manet in their different ways went on to become two of the most progressive artists working in European painting during the second half of the century. Fantin-Latour did not. Neither reactionary nor innovator, his absolute dislike of plein-air painting and preference for a nearly monochromatic palette set him apart from the generation of young artists who allied themselves with the Impressionists.

Yet there is something schizophrenic about Fantin-Latour’s talent. On the one hand he was a portraitist of extraordinary ambition and psychological acuity whose works in the genre always impress but never enthral. His chilly, grey-black palette, the emotional distance he keeps from his sitters, and the stiff poses contrived in the interest of compositional balance rather than for natural effect cast a funereal pall over all his group portraits.

On the other hand, the lush imaginative vision he brought to phantasmagorical subjects inspired by Wagner and Berlioz whip up emotion to a point where it parts company with reality. Illustrations to Tannhäuser, Parsifal and Lohengrin initiate the Symbolist movement in painting in France, but for me they are his least successful work. 

And somewhere between these two extremes are the pictures in which he most closely allied himself to the Dutch school and for which he is now remembered: his paintings of flowers. Like Manet, Fantin-Latour painted still lifes for money. He drew a distinction between the group portraits and mythological subjects he exhibited at the Salon in Paris, and the flower studies he showed at the Royal Academy and sold through his London agents Mr and Mrs Edwin Edwards. 

A gem of a show at the Bowes Museum in County Durham has now brought together as many of Fantin-Latour’s flower paintings from British collections as the curators could get their hands on. By hanging pictures that are usually seen on their own in Birmingham, York, London and Edinburgh together with works by Fantin-Latour in their own collection, the curators make it possible to follow his artistic development through the flower paintings alone. We move from gritty early realist studies inspired by Courbet to ultra-refined compositions by a Whistlerian aesthete. 

As young men, Whistler and Fantin-Latour were close friends with shared artistic sensibilities. In a letter to Whistler from the 1860s, Fantin-Latour described painting as “the mysterious harmony of form and colour”. Whether painting portraits or flowers, Fantin-Latour concentrated on these abstract qualities, and in doing so paralleled (to a degree) Whistler’s interest in art for art’s sake. 

Fantin-Latour’s flower paintings are at once utterly natural representations of what he saw in front of him and a formal exercise in tonal harmonies and ultra-subtle colour changes. In a typical study of roses in a glass vase, the delicate tonal range varies from pinky-white to pale yellow, while the whole composition is anchored in a patch of throbbing magenta. In a study of dahlias, hot crimsons and purples blend imperceptibly into cool yellow and white blooms as though the artist’s medium were embroidery and not paint. 

Broadly speaking, you can tell where and when Fantin-Latour painted a picture simply by identifying the flowers in it. When he was in Paris he relied on cut flowers that had been grown commercially in market gardens in the south and brought weekly to the capital’s many flower markets. 

From 1880, he and his wife, the talented flower painter Victoria Dubourg, spent the spring and summer in Normandy, where they grew flowers that were not commercially viable. After breakfast each morning, still wearing his slippers, Fantin-Latour would walk through his garden, picking nasturtiums, pansies and Japanese anemones to create the meltingly beautiful arrangements we see in the late works like the National Gallery’s glorious Rosy Wealth of June, where seven different roses, mixed with delphiniums, dahlias, phlox, belladonna, lilies and begonias almost burst out of the canvas. 

I’ve sometimes heard Fantin-Latour’s flower paintings dismissed as inconsequential. Well, maybe they are, but if you don’t like looking at a picture like that, then you don’t like art. If you are within shooting distance, do go, and allow some extra time to inspect the newly restored and utterly transformed Bowes Museum. 

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Once criticised, painter Tagore now aesthetic icon

He has inspired generations of painters, yet Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, who began to paint at the late age of 67, was dismissed by peers and critics as a "bad and untrained" artist during his lifetime.

"The first exhibition of Tagore's paintings in May 1930 in Paris that received an overwhelming response was later exhibited in Kolkata (in 1931 and 1932). But the audience there was strangely silent and I remember reading articles criticising his style and technique," senior artist Niren Sengupta told IANS.

In 1931, Tagore displayed at the Kolkata Town Hall and in February 1932 at the Government School of Art with 265 art works.

"The critics did not like Tagore's childlike adaptation of global artistic practices - especially those from the Far East and Europe - to create a unique Indian language," said Sengupta.

"The fact that no artist could copy Tagore's style and ideas fuelled the resentment further," said the Delhi College of Art principal.

Sengupta, who inaugurated an exhibition by 35 artists from West Bengal, "A Tribute to Tagore", at the Epicentre in Gurgaon a week before his 150th birth anniversary May 9, said, "Tagore's critics have been proved wrong with time."

"His works are now a national property and sought after," Sengupta said. The senior artist is inspired by the versatility of Tagore in his own abstract canvas that portray the poet as a man with many colourful faces.

Tagore's art is a complex combination of doodles, word art, quaint man-animal creatures and gaunt-faced ovoid women painted in ink, water colour, oil and mixed media.

According to a biographical volume, "Something Old, Something New: Rabindranath Tagore's 150th anniversary volume (edited by Pratapaditya Pal)", he "always regretted that his countrymen did not appreciate his paintings".

His peer's uncertainty with his style stemmed from the fact that he had no formal training in art, says the biographical volume.

Artist Nandalal Bose, alarmed by the amateurishness of Tagore's works, patiently compiled an album of reproductions of European masters for Tagore so that he could learn to draw properly. But Tagore returned the album saying, "it could help his students".

On his 150th birth anniversary barely a week away, the focus of the India and Bangladesh governments' celebrations, which begin here Friday, is on the poet's art and philosophy - the lesser known aspects of Tagore.

A special digital compilation of art, "Chitravali", will be released to coincide with his birth anniversary and a mammoth exhibition interpreting Tagore works and his original art by Indian and Bangladeshi artists will be on display in Bangladesh and India.

At the exposition, "A Tribute To Tagore", artists use his style, technique, ideology and motifs from his compositions to translate them into their creative idioms on the canvas.

A portrait of Tagore seated in meditative repose by senior artist Sudip Roy using the wash painting method stands out from the rest for his mastery over the medium. A charcoal composition, "Essence of Kolkata", by Subrata Das explores the rural soul of the metropolis with the hand-carted rickshaw as a metaphor.

"When I see rain in north Kolkata - around the Chitpore area, I think of Tagore. He is from north Kolkata. The city looks beautiful during monsoon," artist Dilip Chowdhury told IANS.

Chowdhury, who creates rainwashed urban landscapes with acrylic on canvas using the technique of water colour, "reacts to Tagore's poems as an artist".

Artists Anup Giri and Subroto Gangopadhayay prefer to interpret Tagore's philosophy and artistic ideology on paper. They play with Tagore's commitment to rural reconstruction and promotion of the ethnic arts of Bengal and India on their canvas of dancing tribal men and women.

According to curator Ameeshi Tapuriah, the owner of the Art Nouveau Gallery, who has spent her childhood in Kolkata, "Any artist who is connected to Bengal cannot stay away from Tagore - they are inspired by him in some way."

Tagore continued to paint till his death in 1941, and his brush strokes have evidently outlived the harshest of criticis.

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E.J. Hughes's depiction of boats off the coast of Sidney is arguably his finest work, expert says

Nick Pr David Heffel (left) and Robert Heffel stand in front of E.J. Hughes's work. The pre-auction estimate is $700,000 to $900,000, but it could be more if a couple of collectors square off over the painting.

E.J. Hughes got out of the army in 1946, bought a cottage at Shawnigan Lake near Victoria, and decided to try his hand at being a full-time artist.

He worked 12-hour days, but his meticulous style made for a small output: There are only a dozen Hughes paintings from the late 1940s. Money was so scarce, he didn't have a car until the late 1950s.

The late 1940s Hughes paintings tend to be a bit darker and more turbulent than his playful later works -a little Van Gogh is mixed into the Rousseau. They rarely come to market, but when they do can fetch big numbers: The 1946 painting Fishboats, Rivers Inlet sold for a record $920,000 in 2004.

That record may be shattered May 17, when the 1948 Hughes painting Coastal Boats Near Sidney, BC goes up for sale at the Heffel Auction of Canadian Post-War and Contemporary Art at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

The striking depiction of two old steamships plying the coastal waters is arguably E.J. Hughes's finest painting. "If you wanted one painting of Hughes, that's the one," says Jacques Barbeau, a prominent Hughes collector.
"If you want the esthetic footprint of E.J. Hughes, I don't think you could have a better example. That is British Columbia. The strength, the power, the scenery, it's all in there."

The pre-auction estimate is $700,000 to $900,000, but if a couple of collectors square off over the painting, it could easily shoot past the $1-million mark. If it does, it would make E.J. Hughes only the 12th Canadian artist to have a work sell for a million dollars.

It may not be the only work that hits the sales stratosphere May 17. Heffel is also selling another exceptional Hughes painting, 1952's Mouth of the Courtenay River, which has an estimate of $500,000 to $700,000.

Mouth of the Courtenay River is painted in a much more familiar Hughes style, a colourful scene of a fisherman steering a gillnetter down the river, with a farm, mountains and clouds in the background.

"It's the yin and the yang of E.J. Hughes," says Barbeau. "One piece that is going to knock you out [Coastal Boats], the other one is more subtle, it's more serene."

Both paintings are being sold by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia, which bought them from Hughes in 1955 at the urging of an art-loving intern, Jack Parnell.

Parnell would go on to become a prominent collector in his own right, and the president of the Vancouver Art Gallery.

"He was very supportive of the arts, right from the time he was interning," says artist Gordon Smith, who is the godfather of Parnell's children.

"He was a very good friend of mine, and he was a good friend of Lawren Harris. He bought a lot of very good paintings. The Ed Hughes ones he bought are tremendous. [One is] going for $1 million and I think he bought it for $300, or less."

Parnell was more than just a friend and collector of local artists; he was often their doctor.
"He was my doctor, and Harris's doctor," recounts Smith.

"Someone got a story where he was playing golf and Lawren had a heart attack and Jack fixed him. Well, Lawren never had a golf club in his hand, ever. So that's not true. But he did save Lawren's life, because he recommended he have [a heart operation for] a new aorta."

Harris was so pleased with his operation he offered paintings to both Parnell and Dr. John Elliot, who had done the operation. The Parnell Harris is now in the Vancouver Art Gallery collection, but the painting Harris gave to Elliot, the 1957 abstract The Spirit of Remote Hills, is also for sale at the Heffel auction, with an estimate of $80,000 to $100,000.

This time, the highest estimates belong to the two Hughes paintings, an untitled 1955 abstract by Jean-Paul Riopelle ($900,000 to $1.2 million), and Dimanche (1966) and Les Moniales (1964) by Jean-Paul Lemieux ($400,000 to $600,000 each).

"We're seeing a little bit of the demographics changing with the estates that are coming to us, where the estates now are a generation or a decade later," explains David Heffel.

"The collectors [who amassed their collections in the 1930s and 1940s] are dissipating and are being replaced by the collectors who were highly active in the '50s and '60s."

The top items in the Fine Canadian Art sale are two Harris paintings estimated at $250,000 to $350,000, In The Ward (1920) and North Shore, Lake Superior, Pic Island II (1922). Emily Carr's The Gnarled Tree (1913-18) is estimated at $200,000 to $300,000, while David Milne's Woman and Bright Trees, West Saugerties, NY (1914) is estimated at $250,000 to $300,000.

There is a viewing of the auction lots in Montreal through today and there will be another in Toronto from May 5 to 7. Vancouverites will be able to view the art May 13-17 at the Heffel Gallery, 2247 Granville St. (Sotheby is also having a local viewing Tuesday at the Contemporary Art Gallery for its Toronto auction May 26.) The Riopelle abstract may wind up fetching the highest price at the Heffel auction -the late Quebec painter has had 10 paintings that have sold for over $1 million, third behind Lawren Harris (who has 18) and Tom Thomson (who has 10).

If Hughes cracks the million-dollar mark, though, it will have special significance for the Heffel brothers.
"You know, Emily Carr and E.J. Hughes are really the foundation of our business," says David Heffel, who took over the auction with his brother Robert after their father died.

"My dad was very fortunate to own the [Hughes painting] Indian Church, which is a masterpiece as well. He had it hanging here for many years, and a collector from Vancouver came in and says he wanted to buy it.

"My dad says, 'It's not for sale,' and the collector says, 'Well, what are you, an art dealer or a collector?' He got really angry with my dad and stormed out. Eventually he won, and my dad sold him the painting."

Edward John Hughes was born in North Vancouver in 1913 and grew up in Nanaimo. He attended the Vancouver School of Art, and post-graduation formed a mural group with fellow artists Orville Fisher and Paul Goranson. But he wasn't really able to pursue painting until he became one of Canada's war artists during the Second World War.

Hughes was surprisingly prolific as a war artist: the Canadian War Museum has more than 500 Hughes works in its collection (118 paintings, 414 drawings). He was able to take some paint and canvas with him when he left the army -Heffel thinks Coastal Boats may have been done on an army canvas.

His big break came in 1951, when he met Montreal art dealer Max Stern. Stern represented Hughes for 35 years, and gave him the financial support to keep painting.

"I think for him the greatest reward was that he was able to continue painting," says Heffel.

"A lot of painters from his generation [couldn't]. Paul Goranson had to move to New York and painted backdrops for the Metropolitan Opera, Orville Fisher I think was an art teacher up the valley. They had to compromise, they weren't able to paint full-time in the studio.

"Whereas Hughes was very fortunate to be discovered by Max Stern. If Stern didn't come along, Hughes would have moved into something else, perhaps rejoining the military."

Hughes rarely left Vancouver Island, and didn't attend the retrospective the Vancouver Art Gallery had of his work in 1994. (Coastal Boats Near Sidney, BC is on the cover of the Hughes bio by VAG curator Ian Thom that accompanied the exhibition.) If you did meet Hughes, however, he was very affable. Which is partly why he didn't like to socialize.

"He'd open up and sit and talk with you for four hours, but he'd get back home and couldn't draw for two days," says Barbeau, who has written a couple of books about Hughes.

"He was worked up. That's why he wasn't too good on the social scene. [But he was a] very nice guy, totally dedicated to painting."

How dedicated? "He had his lawn in Duncan paved over so he didn't have to cut the lawn and cut into his painting hours," laughs Heffel.

Hughes died in Duncan in 2007 at the age of 93. After many years of financial struggle, he was finally able to enjoy financial stability in later life, even some luxuries.

"He loved his Jaguar," says Barbeau.

"He had two of them, I think. When he started to make money, that's what he bought. But that was all that he ever spent money on."

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