Abstract art, which was news 60 years ago, lives on. As a heroic, romantic form, "action painting" - a style in which the dynamics of applying the paint are clearly evident - makes manifest man's struggle to find his place in the universe. This is not a picture. The lone artist assembles the forms and colours of chaos into some semblance of order, visible to us later in the traces of his actions.
Richard Brown is a Victoria abstract artist. He has written that in the mid-20th century, painting "moved away from anything 'representational' and accepted the canvas as a two-dimensional surface. ... Spontaneity and acceptance are very much a part of this type of art work."
Is the outcome of this action an object of beauty, an image of harmony or a tale of angst? That's eventually in the eye of the beholder. But for the artist, it's an existential engagement, a voyage of discovery. The push and pull of the paint, the interplay of thought and accident - these are the means by which the artist's struggle is revealed.
Brown recently created a painting especially for a storefront gallery, located on level three of the Bay Centre (near the entrance to the Bay). It is 8.5 metres long and a little more than a metre high. Brown's work is also on view at Victoria International Airport. Both installations are projects of the Community Arts Council.
Later in the journey of Modernism, action painting gave way to the more broadly painted colour-field abstraction. At Winchester Modern, several works by senior Canadian painter William Perehudoff present this new cooler, more atmospheric approach to art without imagery. One canvas infused with mocha brown carries a spray of tongues of bright acrylic paint. The paint itself is the subject of interest, more than the activity of its application. The Perehudoff is joined by broadly painted canvases by Toni Onley (an early collaged and stained work) and a huge elliptical painting by Claude Tousignant.
In perfect counterpoint are new glass sculptures by Waine Ryzak. In years gone by, she has cast glass flames, and even made prints based on these two-dimensional shapes. Their symbolic value seemed to overtake the inherent beauty of the material. Recently, working at Miramontes Glass on Ten Mile Point, Ryzak has discovered the seductive joy of colour.
And now, at last, she realizes her elegant concepts in blown glass. Her five new "flames" have forms somewhere out beyond soft-serve ice cream. They also share some of the curves of Italian charms against the evil eye.
It is not necessary to "understand" them to enjoy them. "Ryzak creates sculpture having elegant shape and often no surface decoration," her gallery explains. "For this exhibition, the scale is large and the technique highly complex. Three to five assistants were required during the fabrication."
At Deluge Gallery, the devolution of abstraction continues. When I climbed the stairs to that spare white room, I had it all to myself. On the walls hung 11 blue rectangles, devoid of symbolic imagery and showing none of the struggle with the brush.
These patches of blue are photographs. "When I made [them] I used colour slides that were oversaturated in blue because of using a tungsten film in daylight (mistake; the wrong condition). So the images are of the ocean horizon ... I wanted to leave this work open to interpretation, without adding any sort of narrative that could take over." Just blue.
Lying on the gallery bench, I let the world fall away - nothing to mar the silence but a faint hum of the lights and the distant swish of cars below on Yates Street. Those blue panels on the wall might have been portholes in my rocket ship. Of course, these monochromes by artist Kendra Wallace have lots of precedents - Konstantin Malevich, Yves Klein.
Wallace lives and works in Montreal and in Le Fresse, France. Leaving the gallery, I was undecided. Was I having an enlightened experience, or viewing the fall line of The Emperor's New Clothes?
A trip to Open Space moved the definition of art beyond even that. Christopher Butterfield has created a John Cage installation - "an anarchic soundscape of spoken words and empty space." Mounted above your head in part of the gallery are 36 clever little speakers. They hang down, pointing this way and that.
A job lot of old technology is impressively wired up, giving each speaker its own part to play. And on each, Cage's voice intones syllables drawn from Thoreau's Essay on the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Sublime nonsense.
