Many artists are pretty easy to categorize. Some are landscape painters. Some paint animals, others cityscapes or even trains. Overall, artists tend to stick to what they know and what they’re comfortable with.
Not so Vernon artist Jerry Markham. The only way to easily categorize Markham is to say he’s an oil painter and then to leave it at that, as his style changes as much as his subject matter.
Some of his paintings feature smooth and crisp lines. Others are looser, chunkier, but with a softness and subtlety, while still others are a wild riot of colour and brush strokes.
His landscapes range from pastoral, with soft, subtle farming scenes, to the sublime, where mountains rise above a line of riders on horseback and the ruins of a crumbling house are slowly being reclaimed by the grass and the trees.
He also takes on a contemporary approach with bold paintings featuring strong, almost ferocious strokes, depicting subjects not normally considered, such as a barber, a taxidermist or burger cook.
The one common thread behind all of what Markham does is passion and curiosity; whether it’s his passion for a place, or the passion someone else has for what they do.
“It seems broad in the subject and the styles,” Markham said recently in explaining his approach and style. “I really try to focus on what captures my interest. It seems broad to the view, but it is what interests me so it doesn’t feel so broad necessarily.”
Markham began painting seriously 15 years ago and in that time he has constantly pushed himself to learn and grow and experiment.
“I’m always playing around with how chunky you can get it (oil paint) and how thin I can keep it, and play around with the properties,” he said. “I figure if you’re not learning you’re stagnant and I don’t want to do that, so I keep trying to learn new things. And painting what interests me has always kept me exploring new ideas, so I don’t get stuck in just one thing.”
That approach has allowed him and his work to evolve, opening the door to paint subjects he would have never considered approaching a few years ago.
“For the last year or a little more, I’ve been really interested in painting people doing what they are passionate about. It was just recently that it was that we narrowed down what I’ve been trying to paint. I didn’t really know. I just thought, ‘Hey, that’s cool. I want to paint that.’”
That’s led him to paint environmental portraits of the barber, the taxidermist and the burger cook.
“I’m not sure exactly what it is. I just find it really interesting that people carve out a life for themselves that isn’t typical: a guy in Vancouver who is really passionate about burgers and milkshakes, and who knew?”
Markham will be at The Avens Gallery in Canmore Saturday, June 28, from noon to 4 p.m. as part of his solo show Multiplicity by Jerry Markham: An Unveiling.
Multiplicity, he said, was chosen as a theme or an idea to allow him to show the range of his work in one exhibition.
“We’ve never done one like this before. The theme is not to have a theme. I’ve done landscape and the big works together, but this is mostly work I’ve been working on this year. Anything that we liked and held back for this show,” he said.
Markham will have about 20 pieces in the exhibition ranging in size from six by eight inches up to 36 by 44 inches. The small pieces tend to be studies done outdoors that sometimes lead to the large pieces, when Markham feels he has more he wants to say or feels the small studies are missing.
“Sometimes they don’t warrant as big paintings, there’s not quite enough there. Sometimes there’s nothing more I want to say,” he said.
Either way, he goes with his gut and works out just what it is he’s trying to say through the paintings themselves.
“I work two ways,” he said. “I think art is being a really good craftsman and being able to inject emotion with that. You can have raw emotion and not have art because it is poorly crafted and you can have craftsmanship and a beautiful painting, but it has no heart. I don’t think that is art either.”
