It’s often believed that artists are solitary creatures lurking in their studios with no contact with the outside world.
While there is some shred of truth to that, artists, like anyone else, need contact with the outside world; like people in any field they need guidance, advice and inspiration.
Often, that comes from another artist or teacher who can say, “here’s how it works.”
An upcoming exhibition – Cultivation, which opens at Elevation Contemporary Art Gallery on Saturday (Sept. 28) – celebrates the connection artists have between those who have mentored them and those they are mentoring.
It’s a celebration of the inspiration artists draw from their mentors and the individuals they in turn mentor.
“You think of an artist in their studio doing their own thing, but it’s not true,” Canmore encaustic painter Pascale Ouellet said Monday (Sept. 23). “I take ideas from everybody and energy from everybody. It’s a melting pot in my brain and my paintings come out the way they are because of the confidence people give me.”
Cultivation features the work of seven local and regional artists, including Ouellet and Calgary painter Amy Dryer, along with work or other links to their mentors and those they have mentored or inspired.
Ouellet’s journey as an artist began in her hometown in Quebec where sculptor Raymond Warren, her best friend’s father, showed her it was entirely possible to make a living as an artist.
“For me to see that coming from a small town where nobody was living as an artist, except him, was important. To see him, to witness him, being there and being able to have a family, he was a good influence,” she said, adding that when she asked him if she should go to art school, he said “yes.”
“I went to art school because of him,” Ouellet said.
Along with his encouragement came the understanding that it is more important as an artist to be creative rather than strive for perfection.
“He always pushed the creative side, but not the result. Be creative, but it doesn’t matter if it is not perfect in the end,” she said. “That was a breath of fresh air to say it doesn’t matter if it’s perfect as long as you are creating.”
It’s advice Ouellet said she still turns to, especially when the going gets tough and the creative process bogs down: Warren’s reminder to keep at it still resonates.
And as Ouellet continues to draw inspiration from Warren, she has begun to inspire and influence other artists, in this case, Shelley Wuitchik, who took a weekend workshop with Ouellet.
Dryer, meanwhile, whose bold and expressive work has been featured in previous exhibitions at Elevation Gallery, said her mentor, Stan Phelps and his wife, Carol Bondaroff, provided her with her first exposure to the technical side of art, but also allowed her, like, Ouellet, to understand at an early age that it is possible to become an artist.
“I took classes from (Phelps) when I was about 11 or so until high school,” Dryer said. “He taught me the technical aspects of painting, but both he and his wife are practicing artists so it was my first real exposure to the arts life, their commitment, their practice.”
Those lessons, and Phelps’s instruction, allowed Dryer to become conversant in the “language” of art.
“I pursued painting and I think it is really important at a young age to be exposed to the technical elements of the practice and tradition of painting and the exposure to composition and form and a language,” she said. “I think there’s tradition and there’s things you learn and technique and magic of being an artist, but it is not always definable. They were out of the box and I was so inspired by that as a young person.”
Today, even though she has developed her own artistic language distinct from Phelps’s, Dryer still finds comparisons in her choice of colours: purple and other dark colours, and her choice of subjects: figurative and music-related.
Now, well established as an artist, Dryer has been mentoring Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD) student Michaela Fach over the past year in Calgary.
“She’s come to my studio quite often over the past year and a half and she’s not painting per se, but she spends time in my studio writing, we talk a lot about work. We talk a lot about her direction as an artist, so it’s more unofficial in terms of technique and stuff, but she says I’ve influenced some of her choices and her direction,” Dryer said.
She added she hopes to be able to pass on some of the insights she gained as a young woman, seeking to understand what it means to be an artist.
“I hope I can provide her some insight into what that looks like in terms of practice and art and having something to care about. Having done that myself, I hope I can give back to someone else trying to make their way in the world,” Dryer said.
Elevation Gallery is hosting an opening reception on Saturday from 2-5 p.m.
