Sarinah Haba is my new favourite artist – because sometimes I find myself a little worn out from the saturation of mountain landscape painting found in the Bow Valley.
Haba, a graduate of the Emily Carr University of Art and Design and a Vancouver-based artist, is having her first solo exhibition on April 25 (2-5 p.m.) at Canmore’s Elevation Gallery (729 8 St.). The exhibition, entitled: The Maker’s Mark, will include a mix of her deteriorating, derelict structures, along with haunting wildlife pieces she’s busily preparing right up to the exhibition.
“With DaVinci-esque precision and grace, she captures subject matter both natural and built,” said Elevation co-owner Phil Baxter. “The beauty of the decaying structures rendered in scrapes and scribes of monochrome colour are the center of Sarinah’s practice. More recently, she has been inspired to capture the natural environment – caribou, bears and bison, and even the figure – creatures so full in character and motion as to suggest a narrative.”
Most recently, Haba exhibited her structure pieces at Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre, work which took up most of 2014 for the acrylic painter. In 2015, she’s switched gears and gone towards the direction of wildlife.
“I’ve been working on the animals and I’ve done bears and things like that for the (Elevation) gallery before, I just like the line of them,” Haba said. “My mom has dementia and she’s been talking about bears all the time, she has this big fear of these bears and I just like the idea and I like this kind of big rearing up kind of bear figure – like a big fear.”
Whether working on a painting of a structure, figure or animal, Haba says she is always seeking out the contrast of the dark and the light – finding the right light for her subject.
“That’s what draws me to any subject I like or interests me in it, the line that is created by it, like a sweeping line or a gesture or movement,” Haba said. “I like the line of a bear, the line of an antler, I’ve been watching nature programs and stuff like that and sketching and we’ve got bears up on Grouse Mountain in a compound, and I think it’s relevant for the area of Elevation Gallery as well.”
What makes her stand out is the beauty she can find in the lines found inside derelict and aging architectural structures – she’s able to make rust beautiful.
“That rusty kind of dirty line like that, I just like the isolation of it, I like the colour palette of it,” Haba said. “The colours are a little more muted for me. It’s just a lone standing building, unoccupied now. It had a past, once was active, now isn’t.”
Even though her subject matter continually changes, what stays the same for the artist is her use of a muted palette on wood panel.
“I’ve got a couple on canvas, but it’s not how I like to work,” Haba said. “I like to initially draw it really hard so the wood is better for that and then I do a lot of scraping with the palette knife and sand paper and it’s better for that kind of thing – you get to physically push it.”
She says her colour choices are what she can personally cope with, and when she has experimented with more colour it makes her uncomfortable. “It’s kind of how I see things, I think it’s more close to the colours of nature,” Haba said. “When I look around, colours are muted, there’s not a lot of bright colour, like big popping techni-colour. Maybe the odd pop of it, but overall, I think it’s just more common for me and hopefully the viewer.”
