Visual arts & new media

This week’s Work of the Week is Viking II by Douglas Motter.

When someone says the word ‘Viking’ do you think of a burly, blonde man wearing a horned helmet who plunders villages? If so, you may want to think again!  A new study suggests that Vikings didn’t exactly fit these modern stereotypes. Read more about it here. 
 

About the Artist: Douglas Motter (1913-1993)

Douglas Motter was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1913. He moved to Calgary, Alberta with his family in 1919. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interior Design from the University of Missouri in 1935.

Motter was an educator, a watercolour painter, a printmaker, and a weaver. He was introduced to hand weaving in 1945, when he bought a loom for his wife. What started out as a hobby ended up turning into a career, as he was weaving professionally by the 1960s. Motter opened his own weaving studio called Doug Motter & Associates in 1961. His company specialized in creating decorative pieces, and one-of-a-kind fabrics. His studio also provided novice weavers with a place to test out their weaving skills.

In 1958, Motter was selected to exhibit at the Brussels World Fair. He was also chosen to exhibit at the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal, Quebec (or Expo 67, as it commonly referred to).

Motter started teaching classes part-time at the Alberta College of Art in 1962, and by 1968 he was a full-time instructor at the College specializing in weaving, drawing, and design. He made a significant contribution to establishing the visual arts scene in Calgary, as he was one of the founders of the Allied Arts Centre. Motter also served as the President of the Alberta Society of Artists for two terms, and held the position of Provincial Director for Alberta at the Canadian Crafts Council.

His watercolour paintings reside in private and public collections in North America.

This week’s Work of the Week is October Snow, Foothills Morning by David More.

Well, it’s mid-October and that means it’s time for snow! Many parts of Alberta will be getting their first snowfall of the year today.

About the Artist: David More

David More is a painter, illustrator, author, and muralist.
 

Born in Scotland, he moved with his family to Canada in 1948, eventually settling in Red Deer, Alberta. Growing up in a community surrounded by forests and parks had a profound effect on shaping his art practice, especially what he calls his direct landscape paintings. He makes beauty out of the ordinary, whether depicting wild or manicured spaces, and explores in paint the range of moods in places often known only to locals.

More uses his art to explore subtle changes in the landscape, including the ebb and flow of the Medicine River through the seasons, the various cloud formations over the sky in the prairies, and the slow but destructive effects of acid rain in New Brunswick. More began his Garden Ceremony series in 1975, and he has returned to this series continually over the years. Inspired by his travels throughout Canada and to countries including Brazil, France, England, Trinidad and India, these large-scale garden paintings explore the juxtapositions between man-made and organic forms.

He graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design (now the Alberta University of the Arts) in 1972. In his early career, he worked as an art history researcher, a medical graphics artist, and taught at the Alberta College of Art and Design for three years. He came back to Red Deer and was a part-time instructor in the faculty of visual arts at Red Deer College for over 30 years, until his retirement in 2014.

In 2019, More donated about 200 sketches, drawings, and paintings to the Red Deer Museum & Art Gallery, as a way to give back to the community where he has spent most of his life painting the fields, streams, and skies.

This week’s Work of the Week is Revenant Portrait No. 5 Locked Doors by Calgary artist Karrie Arthurs.

About the Artist: Karrie Arthurs

Karrie Arthurs is a Calgary-based artist who works with paper and ink. A long-time tattoo artist, Karrie says her two artistic practices influence one another—almost melding together.
 

For several years, she has sourced and collected a large amount of “antique” paper, envelopes, documents, portraits etc., some dating 150 years old or more. This is the material she incorporates into her art - drawing on it with ink, charcoal and chalk primarily.

You can learn more about Karrie Arthurs and her artistic practice in her Alberta Artist Profile on our website.

This week’s Work of the Week is Perception 3 by Robert Dmytruk.
 

About the Artist: Robert Dmytruk

After earning his B.Ed. in Secondary Art Instruction (1980) at the University of Alberta, Robert Dmytruk undertook three decades of teaching Alberta teens the values and techniques of painting, drawing, and mixed media. Using those same modes for his own artistic practice, Dmytruk began painting plein air landscapes, but then began obliquely depicting environmental themes in his exploration of rural and urban landscapes. At the same time, he was developing his own style with influences arising from artists such as Cy Twombly, Paul Klee, and Joan Miro. In Robert Dmytruk – Transitions (Rich Fog Micro Publishing, 2013), Julie Oakes remarks that Dmytruk “speaks volumes with his lines, textures, patches of colour and undulating toned-downed atmospheres. His paintings are in fact playful, lilting, and without a didactic hidden agenda, accepting the great opposites of our modern dilemma.”

Dmytruk has mounted numerous solo exhibitions, including at Edmonton’s The Works Festival, St. Albert’s Profiles Gallery, and Stony Plain’s Offenhauser Art Museum. The Alberta Foundation for the Arts Collection, the Strathcona Permanent Art Collection, and private collectors own selections of his work.

In addition to receiving the Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence in the Fine Arts, Dmytruk also won the Award for Teaching Visual Arts from the Emily Carr School of Art and Design—both in 2006.

After teaching and serving as an administrator in art schools, universities, and conferences in Canada and the U.S., Dmytruck retired to Summerland, British Columbia to create art full-time in his private studio.

This week’s Work of the Week is The Accident by Rita McKeough.

This artwork was part of the recent Travelling Exhibition Program (TREX) exhibition Mittenism and the Quest for Empathy. You can see all the artworks in this exhibition at alberta.emuseum.com/exhibitions/560/mittenism-and-the-quest-for-empathy.

This exhibition features etchings and lithography prints by renowned interdisciplinary artist Rita McKeough. Over the last 30 years, McKeough has been a major contributor to Canada’s strong reputation in audio, media installation and performance based visual art. Early on in her career, McKeough translated her ideas through etching and lithography techniques, creating several series of works that use inanimate objects to explore the complex emotion of empathy. Is this ball ok?, The Canadian Cookie Association and Manifesto of Mittenism initially appear childlike but through time reveal a conceptually complex narrative balanced with a quirky and sometimes dark absurdity.
 

The exhibition Mittenism and the Quest for Empathy was curated by Xanthe Isbister and organized by the Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre.

About the Artist: Rita McKeough

Rita McKeough was born in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, studied printmaking and sculpture at the University of Calgary and received her BFA in 1975. She returned to the East Coast to attend the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax and was awarded her MFA in 1979. Throughout her career she has instructed at numerous universities and art colleges across Canada, including NASCAD, the University of Calgary, the University of Manitoba and the Banff Centre, and since 2007 she has instructed full time at the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD). She has become an influential role model and mentor who inspires colleagues and encourages younger artists.

Want to see more artworks by McKeough? On now, until December 12, is the exhibition Rita McKeough | darkness is as deep as the darkness is at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre.

In honour of Métis Week (November 15-21), this week’s Work of the Week is Making Faces by Métis artist Heather Shillinglaw.
 

About the Artist: Heather Shillinglaw

Heather Shillinglaw graduated in 1996 from the Alberta College of Art and Design (now the Alberta University of the Arts).

Her mixed-media work explores the bridging of cultures as she has experienced it as a Métis woman and as a traveler to other territories and countries. She is intrigued by the "similarities and differences" between cultures, something that her own heritage allows her to access more readily. In 1993, Heather partnered with National Film Board and Women of the Métis Nation using a film Daughter of the Country Series to create new works.

She is represented in numerous public, private and corporate collections and is an active member of several Métis organizations including Women of the Métis Nation. She has exhibited extensively around Alberta over the past ten years.

This week's Work of the Week is Dark Horse by Calgary-based artist Yvonne Mullock. 
 

This artwork came into the AFA's collection in 2018 through the Art Acquisition by Application program. 
 

You can see this artwork in person at the Jarvis Hall Gallery where its currently on view until January 16, 2021 in the exhibition up front w/ Yvonne Mullock.

According the Jarvis Hall Gallery website: 

DARK HORSE is a multifaceted body of work that uses iconic symbols synonymous with cowboy culture – the stetson hat and horse as tropes to explore Calgary’s long and entwined history of ranching and the city’s historic annual Stampede event. Using print, video and sculpture DARK HORSE explores an innovative horse-centric printmaking method and invites viewers to delve into cowboy identity and Western mythologies that hover over the history, collective memory and folklore traditions in Calgary.

The Jarvis Hall Galley is located at 333B 36th Avenue SE in Calgary and is open by appointment only. Details online at: jarvishallgallery.com.

About the Artist: Yvonne Mullock

Yvonne Mullock is a graduate from Glasgow School of Art and is currently based in Calgary, Canada.

Her multidisciplinary art practice explores materiality and the processes embodied in the act of making. Incorporating collage, sculpture, ceramics, video and textiles, her work explores ideas of authorship, craft and labour for both gallery and site-specific installations.

WILL, Mary Louise Shannon
September 9, 1944 – Sampson, New York
October 20, 2021 – Calgary, Alberta
 

Mary Shannon Will, an artist known for colourful, witty ceramic sculpture and vibrant abstract painting, died of ALS on October 20 at Chinook Hospice in Calgary. A senior member of the Calgary art community, she was 77.

Shannon Will was born in Sampson, New York in 1944. Her childhood was spent in Seattle, Washington and then in Madison, Wisconsin, where Mary completed high school. Mary credited her father, an amateur artist who served in the US Navy and later worked in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, for encouraging her creative bent. After a year at Coe College, a liberal arts college in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, she studied ceramics at the University of Iowa (1964–1967), the Tuscarora Pottery Summer School (1966–1967), and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque (1970–1971). Mary moved to Calgary with her husband, artist John Will in 1971, and immediately set up her ceramic studio at their home in Lower Mount Royal.

Albuquerque was Mary’s life-long second home, a place she returned to annually. She loved taking trips into Santa Fe with her sister Michelle and her dogs to comb second-hand stores for unique pieces of turquoise jewelry and collectibles. While traveling throughout the southwestern United States and Canada, rarely would Mary and John miss a roadside attraction where a postcard, souvenir “floaty pen,” antique thermometer, or western-themed café cup and saucer would await them. Trips to New Mexico often included visits to Taos, Chaco Canyon, Acoma, Frijoles Canyon, and other ancient Pueblo sites that are home to the diverse Indigenous peoples of the Southwest and are places Mary held dear since first visiting them with her parents. Over the years, the people, light, colour, and cultures of the Canadian Prairies, New Mexico, and the Southwest intertwined to weave a strong network of relations and experience that shaped Mary’s life and art.  

Mary made art for over 50 years. During the 1960s and early 1970s she made functional studio pottery, but her pots quickly morphed into brightly coloured ceramic sculptures that recall sensuous botanical and biological organisms. Around 1980 Mary visited the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design while John taught summer classes there. Here her existing interest in systems, rules, and chance blossomed to guide her use of colour and pattern in a series of abstract geometric ceramic sculptures made between 1978–1985. These works with their glowing glazed surfaces of solid and graduated colour precisely patterned with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of tiny dots and dashes mark the trajectory of her practice for the years to come.

Mary began to make prints, drawings, and paintings using highly subjective systems and processes from the mid-1980s on. In the mid-1990s, Mary was an artist resident at the Banff Centre for the Arts where she discovered a synergy between the pixelated digital technology of Photoshop and her method of working with generative systems, patterns, chance, and colour. After much trial and error—and good-hearted collaborative toil with the computer technicians—Mary began producing archival inkjet and mixed-media works with paint where grids of digital pixels glitch and dissolve under the artist’s subjective systems.

From 2005 on Mary returned exclusively to painting small, intimate, and square works where the layers of colour glow and shimmer to create a jewel-like depth. These works are intuitive responses to the people, places and things that shaped the artist’s experience and perception of the world in which she lives: a trip to India with her friends Gisele Amantea and Peter White, a place in New Mexico, a residency with Jeffrey Spalding at the Tao Hua Tan International Artist Retreat and Residency (China), a shape from a doodle done while watching film noir. Mary, being a bit of a rascal, was unlike other conceptual artists and never allowed the system to completely override her personal responses to the process or materials. Beauty was her endgame.

Mary, you are as unique, eclectic, and colourful as your work. We will sorely miss you Mary but are truly grateful to have shared in your life. Thank you for the rich legacy you have left us in your work, through it the depth and richness of your life will live on in full colour.

Mary Louise Shannon Will is survived by her husband John Arnold Will, her sister Susan Michelle Shannon (Los Angeles, California), her brother John Thomas Shannon (Missoula, Montana), and is predeceased by her brother Robert William Shannon.

You can view more of Mary's artworks in the AFA's collection through the AFA Virtual Museum.

This week's Work of the Week is Piano Lesson by Vivian Herman. 

One of the more famous compositions for the piano is Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, better known as Moonlight Sonata, by Ludwig van Beethoven. It was composed in 1801.
 

Beethoven is one of the world's most celebrated classical composers, and 2020 marks his 250th birthday! He was born in December 1770, but the exact date is not known. However, he was batized on December 17, 1770, and the custom of the time was to have infants baptized within 24-hours of their birth.

Click the arrows above to scroll through the images. 

It's with great sadness that the AFA has learned of the passing of painter Harold Feist. 
 

Harold Feist was born San Angelo, Texas and was a dual citizen of Canada and the United States.

Feist received a B.F.A. (Honours), from University of Illinois (Champaign) in 1967 and an M.F.A. (Hoffberger Fellow) from Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore, ML in 1969. He was mentored and championed by the influential New York art critic Clement Greenberg and painter Jules Olitski.

Feist eventually came to Canada to teach at the Alberta College of Art (now the Alberta University of the Arts) from 1968–74. He later taught at Mount Allison University, Sackville, NB and at the University of Guelph.

Beginning in the 1960s and continuing well into the 21st century, Feist was featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Canada and in the United States. He was an active and vibrant abstract artist, who was known for his large Colour Field paintings in acrylic and latex. His work can be found in public and private collections across and the United States and Canada including the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA) and Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton, AB). The AFA is also pleased to have three artworks by Harold Feist in our collection. You can view them in the slideshow above. 

Harold Feist was a father to four children, including singer/songwriter Leslie Feist, who uses her surname Feist as her stage name. 

AFA Art Collections Consultant Gail Lint was fortunate enough to have Harold Feist as professor at the University of Alberta in the 1970s, and she'd like to share a fond memory she has of him: 

“Harold Feist was a professor of mine for the visual art fundamentals course at the U of A during the 1970’s. He co-instructed the course with Graham Peacock – it was a very interesting summer!

Harold was an excellent instructor, and a story he shared with me was how he arrived at titles for his abstract paintings. He was standing on a street corner and a piece of paper blew against his leg. He rescued it only to discover a pamphlet from the horse races. He adopted the names of the horses to the title of his paintings. I believe the AFA painting ‘High a Silver’  (shown above) is one of those titles.”

Our condolences to Harold Feist's family and friends. 

Read Harold Feist's obituary. 

Read the Globe and Mail's tribute to Harold Feist.