Painting on location is familiar territory for Banffite painter Wendy Bradley. She can be found on trails and in the natural environment quite often in the Bow Valley with her supplies as she captures our natural landscapes.
Banff’s Canada House Gallery is proud to announce Bradley is now a part of its family and representation and to celebrate the venture, Bradley worked on two pieces outside the gallery on Aug. 23.
“I’m working on a Grotto Canyon piece, it’s 12 by 16 inches and a Grassi Lakes Piece,” Bradley said. “I started with the Grotto piece and what I did was a number of washes, then let it dry and would work on Grassi and came back in. Now I’m doing the painting with thicker opaque paints over the transparent washes.”
The wash Bradley used was a light paint thinner so she could keep the colour in the background she initially applied. “I’m only working this way today because I need to work very quickly and want to finish two paintings by the end of the day, and when I paint en plein air (painting on location) this is my process,” Bradley explained.
“When I work on studio pieces, typically I use a glazy medium and I build up layers of transparent glazes to get the highest resolution and reflective quality in the work and it takes a very long time to do that because you have to wait for the glazes to dry between applications.”
As an artist, Bradley believes it’s a positive occasion when a painter can show the public the artistic process. “You get to demystify it a little bit for people who aren’t familiar with it … it’s a very solitary career; you do most of your work in a solitary studio and all of your decisions and your process are your own so it’s good to be out here and talking to people.
“Occasionally someone will compliment me and I’m almost surprised. One lady said to me, ‘well, you know it’s beautiful.’ But you know, when you usually work by yourself all the time it’s just lovely to have people have an appreciation for what you do.”
Bradley says you don’t necessarily have to think of working from light to dark with the process. “It can also be from thin to thick which is what I’m doing. You can see I’m coming in with brighter colours over the darker wash and just leaving a little bit to peek through to give another added dimension to the work that I’m doing.”
The third generation Banffite currently has several oil paintings in the Canada House Gallery. “They’re all local scenes, primarily from Banff and Yoho, and I thought it would be nice to do two scenes closer to the Canmore area ... and I thought Grotto and Grassi, they’re two of my favourite places to go and be so that’s why I chose them today,” Bradley said.
“It’s also a wonderful thing when you’re painting and children and families are coming up to you and talking to you about what you’re painting and you can ask them if they’ve been to Grotto Canyon, and recommend it will be a great place to take your family.”
Many of her landscape locations aren’t as accessible. Bradley used Lake O’Hara and Mount Assiniboine as examples. “I was born in Banff and grew up here and was gone for awhile when I was married and I have two adult children now and came back to Banff and it’s home and it always will be home,” Bradley said.
Her relationship with Canada House has just begun and she has had both solo and group showings as of late at Banff’s Whyte Museum.
“(Canada House) is such a prestigious gallery and they treat their artists so well and it’s such a great voice for Canadian artists; I’m absolutely thrilled to be here,” Bradley said.
“I definitely paint from a place of joy and gratitude for the landscapes I’m painting. I have a real sense of place here, a real deep sense of place in the mountains.”
Visit www.canadahouse.com/dynamic/artists/Wendy_Bradley.asp to see Bradley’s current works at the Canada House Gallery.
