A NSCAD alumni, Rick Janson studied under Riduan Tompkins, Nancy Edell, Ed Porter and Medrie McPhee before graduating with his BFA in 1987. He is the past editor of Visual Arts News Magazine (Visual Arts Nova Scotia) as well as briefly the editor of the NSCAD Alumni News. He has exhibited at numerous venues as well as had a short film shown at the Atlantic Film Festival in 1998. His studio is in Oshawa, Ontario.
Ah, so close. Art competitions are a way to get your work out there. In the open category, for artists aged 55+, I came second today at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa. Always great to see one’s work in an established gallery.
Of course, these opportunities are a way to reach out to the community, with categories for beginners, hobbyists, and the open category for those of us who have exhibited professionally before. For artists who toil alone in their studio day after day, it’s about getting one’s work out there and making connections.
If you would like to see this painting in person, it will be on display at the RMG in Oshawa until September 25, 2025. While you are there, check out the early postcard exhibit upstairs — it is very funny and shows how much our language has evolved.
I first heard about Warkworth when I bought a painting by Lucy Manley from a craft fair in Cobourg. A plein-air painter, Lucy regularly paints around central east Ontario, including Warkworth, where she gives continuing education classes in painting. Our picture was from a winter scene in a residential part of Warkworth.
We travelled to Warkworth yesterday for two reasons. The first being the long lunch, a special block-long dining experience along the main street (pictured above), the second being a butter dish. There is also an antique store — Weekenders Vintage — that has a decent offering of well-priced vinyl records I had planned to sneak off to, as usual.
Warkworth is part of the broader municipality of Trent Hills, which has a total population of about 14,000 residents. Yet visitors regularly flock to this little community in part for the regular festivals they host as well as the arts and crafts profile. It’s fun. We asked one shop proprieter what they did in the off season? It turned out that they only have one quiet month over the winter, then the traffic of visitors starts to pick up again.
We had just been there in July and had discovered Frantic Farms Gallery just around the corner from the main street. We recognized the pottery on display (along with glass and other hand-crafted items), having bought a tea pot in that style years ago from the Meta-4 gallery in Port Perry. My spouse really liked the design of a butter dish on display, but preferred one in a lemon pattern that was in use for a tea set we saw that day. It turned out the person behind the counter of the gallery was Monica Johnston, who makes the pottery on the premises. She offered to make us one. We agreed to return (Warkworth is a little over an hour from where we live) in August to pick it up.
The butter dish by Monica Johnston that we travelled an hour to retrieve.
Communities often look for the magic formula that will bring life to their town or city. Warkworth has that magic in its energetic shops and galleries. There are no chain store outlets here.
Our neighbours had offered to drive when we suggested coming along, and we had gone cross country through a stunning countryside to get there. You can get there a few minutes faster by taking the 401 then heading north from the Big Apple (Colborne), itself a unique Ontario destination for visitors with its apple-themed shop and bakery. However, the extra few minutes was well worth it.
Given we arrived early, we decided t visit the shops first, checking out the European Patisserie before moving on to the Cheeky Bee gallery (where we found some crazy books) then on to an amazing kitchen-ware shop that offered a range of utensils, dishes and foods, including a jar of Sour Cherry and Prosecco jam imported from the UK (I had some this morning). They also served coffee and treats. As we made our way along the street the small bags we, um I, was carrying expanded. We eventually found our way to the Centre and Main Chocolatier.
Centre and Main Chocolatier in Warkworth, Ontario
We were a bit stunned when we walked in the door. As another patron there had said to us, “it looks like a frickin’ art gallery.” That was true. The lighting was subdued, and on the back wall were dozens of varieties of chocolate bars, some of them award-winning, including the Blood Orange and Rosemary bar, which was among the varieties we purchased. The patron who spoke with us said he relied on the shop to find unusual gifts for friends and family. Our friends bought some sponge toffee covered in milk chocolate. We bought four unique bars of chocolate. Everything on display was made on the premises.
We walked back up the other side of the road, the afternoon getting on and the need for food growing. I ducked into the antique store and got some records, including a 1976 Michel Pagliaro recording featuring three classic hits. I noticed that the lava lamp I saw last time was gone, but they did have a plasma ball that exudes what looks like lightning. The food offerings on the street were limited by the time we worked our way back up again — much of the blackboard erased at a booth where my spouse got a maple hot dog — but people were also going into the restaurants to bring out food to experience the huge communal dining experience. I chose to have a pulled beef sandwich with horseradish. We were also aware that we needed to get back to the pottery and glass studio to pick up the butter dish. Our friends also purchased a cream and sugar set.
My spouse Geraldine (right) and her friend during a visit to Frantic Farms gallery in Julyof this year.
We’ve been to Warkworth a number of times over the years, and always enjoy our visit. We caution our guests that it is not big, but it is a worthwhile visit.
And it all started with a painting.
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Arles, France, was the starting point for our trip up the Rhone River. Throughout the town are signs indicating where Vincent Van Gogh painted many of his iconic pictures. That included one where the house he once shared with Paul Gauguin stood. It was the victim of Allied bombing in World War II, and is now just a grassy area not far from the river. It’s true that Arles is also known for its well-preserved Roman past, but what people get excited about is walking the same streets as Vincent. That includes clustering around the night cafe or visiting the grounds of the asylum.
Clearly the town has recognized the importance of Van Gogh as a destination for travellers, which of course contributes significantly to the local economy. There are many Roman ruins throughout the Mediterranean and beyond. Arles is where the stories about Van Gogh live and breathe. You can feel it there.
In June we took a walk along another art destination: Queen Street West in Toronto. Queen Street West used to be an affordable part of town that artists flocked to. As the artists came, the crowds followed, eventually making it too expensive and effectively shifting the arts community further West. I noticed more chain stores there than there used to be. And so it goes — the first step on the ladder to renewing a community is usually the arts. I just don’t understand why politicians don’t get this?
The latest figures I could find on the arts in Canada were from 2023. All the arts combined amounted to a contribution of $63.2 billion to our GDP. The Visual and Applied Arts amounts to a fraction of that — about $700 million. That’s up from a decade ago, but recent data would suggest that it is now in a slight decline. By comparison, the visual arts alone in France contributes more than $4 billion (USD) to their economy. France has a population that is about 50 per cent larger than Canada, but the art market is more than five times as great. Is there a lesson there?
The recent decline in economic activity surrounding the arts wouldn’t be a surprise given recent news about gallery closures internationally. Some have suggested that instead much more art is changing hands virtually than from traditional bricks and mortar commercial galleries, however, I find that hard to believe, nor have I seen any evidence to support that assertion. It could be that galleries are closing simply because the high rollers that make the big purchases have grown nervous amid a volatile US economy.
It’s true that most commercial galleries post work by their artists on-line, but for most of us who don’t employ art consultants to advise us on our art acquisitions (I can hear the guffaws from here), its hard to get excited about work you haven’t seen in person. I’m attending an on-line workshop next week in how to better photograph my artwork, but no matter what I do to improve that representation, seeing a painting in person makes all the difference.
That does make me also wonder about juried shows that do their work on-line. Are you picking the best work, or are you picking work that represents well on-line?
When I first heard of school boards cutting back on art education, I wondered if we were bringing along a generation that would take little to no interest in the visual arts? There is no question that travelling to see many of the great art museums that I didn’t see many young people in these galleries, at least not accompanied by their parents.
Modern art may have pushed the boundaries of art for more than a century (I would assert there are no boundaries now) but it may have also alienated a large segment of the public. We recently re-watched Burr Steers film Igby Goes Down, of which the director presents Jared Harris’ performance artist character as a point of comic relief. Steers real life brother was a figurative painter, so maybe there was something personal in what he was saying.
Given our hyper-visual culture, having artists sharpen our focus on what we are seeing could be seen as important, make us question the environment we live in. I suspect that broader culture is changing how we interact with art too.
Arles (2025) 12″ x 16″ Oil on Canvas
Today’s painting is one I have previously posted in thegallery section of this BLOG. It’s of Arles, France, viewed from the steps leading up to the Roman Amphitheatre. I was reminded of this view last year watching a Polaris car commercial between innings of a baseball game. “I know that place!” I said out loud. I searched my photo library and sure enough, there it was. I loved the blue sky and the absolutely clear light that I’m sure Van Gogh was drawn to. And as I have said already on this BLOG, I’m drawn to cafes, even ones that haven’t quite opened for the day. If you look carefully, you can see in the shadows a man setting up.
In my painting, I did choose to edit out the text on the side of the cafe, but otherwise, the scene is presented as I saw it. I didn’t try and emulate Vincent’s style (as some artists have tried), but rather chose to do it in my own style of painting.
I did enter this painting — or at least a representation of it — into a competition. I didn’t make the final cut. But it remains one of my favorites from this year.
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Just a note on yesterday’s post — after thinking about it a bit more, I decided to join the artists’ group I spoke of. Hopefully it will lead to participation in a group show in Toronto in the not too distant future.
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I don’t recall how I ever found out about it. For three years I participated in an event called The Little Art Show which raised money for the Riverdale Art Walk.
Once registered to participate, artists got sent a small 7″ x 9″ canvas and a deadline to send or bring it back, presumably, with a painting on it.
The event took place in November at the BMW dealership that overlooks the Don Valley Parkway, the upper-floor room used for the event was mostly glass walled, which would have been challenging had the event been held in the daylight given the backlighting. The paintings, I recall about a hundred or more, were placed along a ledge on the window with an attached bid sheet for the silent auction. There was a lot of furious activity towards the end as people would literally stand beside the painting they wanted to take home less someone outbid them at the very end. I discovered it’s more than just hockey players capable of getting their elbows up.
The event was well managed, with a cash bar and terrific food. Once it got rolling, the room was full of artists and collectors. There was a lot of art chatter. It used to be among the highlights of my year.
I would not only show each year, but would also bid on work, taking home what I referred to as a replacement for my own entry. In fact, I ended up taking home four paintings in three years.
Cobourg (2004) 7″ x 9″ Oil on Canvas.
The first year I entered a tiny painting of the ice cream shop along the waterfront in Cobourg, Ontario (see also Almost Canada’s Capital), of which there was some competition that night in the bidding for it.
I spoke with the winning bidder who said they recognized the location, having spent some time in Cobourg themselves (it’s a small world). Unfortunately the photo I took of the painting is a little bit blurry. It’s hard to work that small!
That is my spouse dressed in green with a determined walk heading towards the door of the shop. The photo at top is from the 2004 show. Facing us is my first cousin Mariola, my spouse Geraldine and my fellow artist friend Robert.
The Riverdale Art Walk is now in its 27th year, so those were early days, but I was impressed by their level of organization and ability to promote that particular fundraising event. I noticed that the same artists’ network now has a permanent gallery (Leslie Grove Gallery on Queen St. East at Jones) and a second Artwalk event at the Shops at Don Mills. They also organize seminars and have opportunities for networking. I love to see artists get organized in this way and may take out a membership soon.
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We pass by these places regularly without paying them much attention. Likely your kids, or in our case, our grandkids, play in them. They usually aren’t that large, little dots of green among a sea of houses. They are often the focal point of a subdivision. They dot suburbia.
Our last two houses in Oshawa, Ontario have been within a block from a community park, usually a few baseball fields and a soccer field, maybe a play park. The one we are now closest to also has a club house, which is used as a rental. We sometimes vote there. On a summer night you can sometimes see large crowds turn out to watch their kids play organized sports. It transforms the environment. There are always at least a few people there.
I think a lot about these spaces, often unloved but very much used. It is far from the places most of us think about that define our cities and towns, but they are crucial. Where and how we live does say a lot about us. If it takes a community to raise a child, it takes a park to give them somewhere to get outside, especially in an age of omnipresent screens.
When I was a kid I met a lot of my friends in these little parks, Darcy, John and Keith holding court in the sandbox. We always made sure to bring a plastic shovel to first get rid of the cat poo.
Connaught Park (2024) 24″ x 24″ Oil on Canvas
I’ve painted these little spaces twice — last year I did a painting of Connaught Park, which I use regularly to go for walks or to cut through to a more commercial area if I don’t feel like driving my car. The cloud cover was quite dynamic that day, making me wonder if I should have brought an umbrella. I loved the shadows not only of what was in the picture, but what was outside the frame. It’s not the first time I’ve painted to reference the world outside the frame.
Back in 2006 I painted Bathe Park, which is hemmed in on three sides by housing, making it en route to nowhere except for the park itself.
Bathe Park (2006) 11″ x 14″ Oil on Canvas
Sometimes if you look hard enough you can find a little beauty in these spaces.
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There was a time when Lunenburg looked like what you would expect of a town of 2,300 permanent residents. Not a lot. The first time I visited was in the off season, and frankly, there wasn’t much there for casual visitors beyond the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic and perhaps walking around to view the buildings that make up the town. There was a Chinese take-out restaurant along Lincoln Street, which on that day (a Sunday), was closed.
Then in 1995 it was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site, the old town the best surviving example of a British pre-designed model town that could be essentially plunked down anywhere. To that end, Lunenburg shares a similar heritage to about 20 other towns and cities in North America, including Niagara-On-The-Lake.
The old town has 400 buildings. According to Parks Canada, 70 per cent of them are from either the 18th or 19th centuries. The town was officially founded in 1753 by 1,453 German-speaking Swiss and French emigres. The town is perhaps best known for its wooden ship building, the home of the famed racing schooner Bluenose, and its successor Bluenose II.
We almost didn’t make it there during my last trip to Nova Scotia in 2021. We had spent some time in nearby Mahone Bay and debated whether to go the additional distance. We had already driven a considerable way that day, doing the Peggy’s Cove loop before heading south along the Lighthouse Route past such communities as Hubbards, Chester, and Western Shore (where we saw signs for Oak Island).
For a town essentially frozen by being named a UNESCO World Heritage site, a lot had changed. There were lively shops, attractive restaurants, galleries, an excellent ice cream shop, and even a Bluenose Company Store, which celebrated the refit that was going on at the time for the Bluenose II. I noticed that the locals had amped up the colour of the building stock too. The Fisheries Museum is still there along the waterfront.
A friend had told me that some believed the Bluenose refit was so extensive the ship should have been renamed the Bluenose III. The Bluenose II was never intended to last as long as it eventually did — it was originally built as a promotion for Schooner Beer, but soon became a symbol of the province. I bought some Bluenose socks that day.
It made me wonder how, according to the town of Lunenburg, 200 long standing active businesses could survive with such a small permanent year-round population? That’s about one registered business for every 10 permanent residents.
I’ve been to Lunenburg many times, including for its folk festival in the summer. Having been away for a whiie, it made me realize what a difference the UNESCO designation has made to the town.
Yellow House (Lunenburg)(2025) 14″ x 18″ Oil on Canvas
I did this painting in tandem with the previous one of Peggy’s Cove. The photographs I used as reference were both shot on the same day.
Unlike the Peggy’s Cove painting, I had no intention to make this one about tourism, although there were many visitors walking around that day amid the splendid sunshine. Perhaps that painting is to come.
I liked the distant view in this one, giving some depth through the buildings and trees to the famed harbour and beyond. When my spouse first saw it, she thought it was from France (a lot of my paintings are). The light did look more like the south of France than Nova Scotia.
I’ve previously noted that I have a tendency to tighten up as I go in for more detail. This time I consciously kept the painting loose, which I think in turn gives it a bit more energy. It likely helps that the canvas sizes are generally increasing for me, which gives me more latitude on the brush strokes. Likely it is also because of the format of this BLOG. When I first began using this WordPress template (Nook) the feature photo containers were all the same proportion. That was a problem, as it would crop my images. It finally struck me that I could do a detail as the feature image, and also insert an image of the painting in its original proportions further within the text. Cropping the details, I started to like what I was seeing, realizing I could still get the kind of details that bring a painting to life and at the same time keep the bush strokes alive. Hmmm. This could work.
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Yesterday I delivered a painting to Oshawa’s Robert McLaughlin Gallery (RMG) in response to a competition/exhibition call-out for work by seniors over age 55. The exhibit will run from August 15 to September 25. After speaking with the curator, I roamed the gallery to take in, among others, a small exhibit of work by the Painters Eleven Group. The Painters Eleven include such notable Canadian abstract artists as Jack Bush, Harold Town, William Ronald, Oscar Cahen, Tom Hodgson, Walter Yarwood and Kazuo Nakamura. The group essentially met at Alexandra Luke’s Oshawa cottage to plan an exhibition together in 1953, remaining as a group until 1966. Remarkably, the RMG holds in its permanent collection about a thousand pieces of work by these artists as a result of the involvement of Luke, herself a member of the group.
I’m probably pigeon-holed as a landscape painter. But in the past two years I have made an effort to stray outside my comfort zone by taking on some new genres, or at the very least to explore genres I haven’t visited in a long time (eg. portraiture). I calculated it would aid the effort to improve my overall painting. Flowers, huh? Never been there before.
This started with my sister posting on FB a photo of some flowers she had placed in a glass vase. My initial thought was this may be easy to do. I liked the way the light refracted through the glass as well as the shadow it threw on the other side. If something is slightly off, who is going to notice? It’s not like a likeness was important. I calculated there was some leeway here.
Looking at true flower painters I noticed how they manage to capture the delicacy of petals as well as the texture. Also the way they transition colour is often masterful. They often paint on much larger canvases too. Hmmm… there may be a reason for that.
As you may have already surmised, that’s not really my jam.
This was really hard. Matching the true colours was not easy — dammit, red flowers? I don’t think I ever got that right. I was tempted at one point to go look for some fluorescent oils as I couldn’t mix what my eye was seeing. Having them sit in space — super hard. To convey volume? Ugh. Delicacy? My painting makes the petals look like they are made out of plasticine.
Having said all that, my little painting remains a fun bit of messing around. As Neil Young once said when accused of singing a bit flat — “that’s my style.”
My inclination is to try this again, perhaps from my own flowers, where I can take time to light them in a way that helps defines the shapes in the way I want them. And for heaven’s sake — no reds next time!
Barb’s Flowers (2024) 11″ x 14″, Oil on Canvas.
Rushing around today getting ready a painting for a competition tomorrow.
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Tourism has been in the news lately. Despite the fact that most of us are or have been tourists at one point, the worm appears to have turned in our culture. Residents of cities like Barcelona are actually using squirt guns on tourists in their city, angry that tourism has led to overcrowding and a rise in housing costs.
Amid this sweltering summer, squirting tourists may be seen as a good thing. I’d certainly welcome it when the mercury hits 30C or more (that’s 86F for those of you who never went metric).
But the problem of overtourism isn’t necessarily the tourists. There’s no question that Air B&B and VRBO have contributed to this situation, re-purposing what should be housing into wannabe tourist accommodation. That’s where the pressure lies. It’s their fellow locals that are appropriating housing stock to make money this way. Let’s keep in mind that while some locals are crying foul, others are happy to count their Euros.
Cruise ships don’t necessarily increase housing rents given those travellers have a place to stay, but the ports can decide to put limits on them too, including their size, as Venice has already done. With some of these towering cruise ships, you literally couldn’t see St. Mark’s from the water. Cities like Barcelona have huge port facilities for docking cruise ships. If you build it, they will come. But then again, maybe Field of Dreams was not big in Catalan Spain.
Emerald has introduced a fleet of smaller “yachts” to get into ports the larger cruises cannot gain entry into. When a ship docks with a hundred or so passengers on board, it barely makes a ripple on the local community. I saw this first-hand taking two Emerald river cruises. The second cruise up the Rhone River in France had fewer than a hundred people aboard. Sensitive to criticism of what they contribute to the localities they sail into, at one point they announced they would refund us a sum from our bills so we could have lunch in the community we were visiting rather than on the ship. It also meant we didn’t have to come rushing back to the ship for lunch. They also made a point of letting us know what provisions they were acquiring locally, including wine, food and entertainment.
I’ve always marvelled how tourists enjoy travelling, but not in the presence of other tourists. What traveller hasn’t experienced this? I once remember waiting in an ever expanding cafeteria line at the Barcelona airport as an Australian woman made a spectacle of herself, arguing that her ham and cheese sandwich wasn’t made of ham. The cashier patiently explained that ham looks different in Spain, reassuring her this was definitely a ham sandwich. “No it isn’t,” she ranted, impervious to logic. She again insisted she wanted a ham and cheese sandwich, and she wanted it now. It went on. I’m sure her fellow Aussies were cringing, as we all were, as our food got cold waiting in line. In Albafeira Portugal we avoided certain areas when the bars were showing football (soccer) games on their big screens. Literally you couldn’t hear yourself think over the lager louts, even at the next bar over. I marvelled at one point how a newly arrived group of young British men dramatically increased the overall volume on the patio we were seated (with no game on the screen), all of them speaking very loudly to one another, all at once. One had to wonder who was actually listening? Given we saw them at breakfast starting to pound back the beer, perhaps it was no surprise. I’m sure somebody has a story about obnoxious Canadian travellers too. We all have ’em.
Recently there have been a number of stories about European destinations levying fines on travellers for a lack of decorum, such as wearing your bathing suit in the town after a day at the beach, or wearing inappropriate footwear on some of the more dangerous walking paths, such as those along the shores of Cinque Terre in Italy. The Grand Canyon has put up warning signs prohibiting drones and warning of the dangers of getting too close to the edge. The stories of tourists tumbling over the edge making selfies were abundant. The guides spoke about the resources needed to rescue them.
Into this cauldron I decided that I wanted to make a painting about tourism.
When I was young and living in Halifax, whenever money got tight I realized I could go down to Peggy’s Cove and make a few drawings that literally sold before they came out of my pad.
Peggy’s Cove is one of those iconic destinations in Canadian tourism. There is a small village around a working harbour for fishers, and then up the hill there is a lighthouse amid some fairly spectacular granite rocks. While the population peaked at 300 (its smaller than that now) there are multiple places to eat and to purchase souvenirs, including the Sou’Wester, which is a massive operation across from the lighthouse. Marine painter William De Garthe lived and worked in Peggy’s Cove, his studio now a seasonal gallery celebrating his life’s work. Nearby is a 98 foot De Garther sculpture in the granite rock celebrating the fishery.
Peggy, Oh Peggy! (2025) 16″ x 20″ Oil on Canvas
My association with Peggy’s Cove happened quite by accident. I was there drawing one day, and before it was complete, someone was willing to offer me money for it. And so it went. When times got lean, in the summer I could get on my bicycle, travel the roughly 40 kilometres from Halifax, sketch for a few hours, and come back and pay my bills. I remember by the end of one summer I was likely the fittest I had ever been in my life, cycling 80 km a day and spending so much time outdoors. I had the time of my life.
I remember the proprieter of the Sou’Wester running out of the restaurant when he saw me one day. A group of tourists were clustered around me. He looked at my drawing, paused a moment, then asked “How much?” He bought the piece and commissioned another drawing of his business.
I got a kick out of the tourists there. I genuinely enjoyed their company. Generally, they were respectful and polite and interested in what I was doing. I still remember one person narrating their home video as they walked around shooting their video. “Oh, and what do we have over here? It’s an artist. Let’s see what he’s doing.” Coming down on my bike, I did get offers from some RVers for a ride back to Halifax, who would offer me refreshments en route. It doesn’t get better than that.
I varied the drawings as much as possible. I may draw the lighthouse and rocks for an hour, then head over to the cove and draw the town. Both are iconic views. The Blue Jays used to celebrate their status as Canada’s national team, using a view of the Peggy’s Cove lighthouse as a stand-in for Eastern Canada, but many travellers are equally familiar with the view of the harbour.
At one point I got the idea that I would track where these tourists came from, putting up a world map on-line with dots to indicate where these drawings were travelling back to. I liked the idea that those who acquired the drawings could see themselves as part of a global experience from this tiny community on the east coast. Somebody from the UK was looking at a similar drawing by the same artist as someone in Japan.
While I have made many pencil drawings, I’ve only painted Peggy twice. The first time was in art school. My professor — Medrie McPhee — was surprised by my scene of the village, claiming that somehow I had found a different view that was “fresh.” I had made so many drawings of the village that I didn’t need to be there to do it. I did it entirely from memory.
Recently my spouse told me that there was a call-out for artists to converge on Peggy’s Cove for a weekend this summer. I live too far away for that, but decided maybe it was time to make a second painting after all these years.
While most people preferred my Peggy’s Cove drawings to edit out all the people, this time I wanted to celebrate them too. They were mostly just ordinary people from all over the world out having a great time. I think we all benefit by sharing our culture, and travel is one of the ways of doing that. I amused myself by wondering if any of the people I captured in the painting were actually named Peggy? Perhaps all the Peggys at Peggy’s Cove? (BTW… the village’s name likely comes from the fact that it borders on St. Margaret’s Bay. The short form for Margaret is Peggy.)
Working from a recent photo, I was reminded of the amazing clarity of light there. The exception would be the afternoon fog that often rolls in and used to signal the end of my working day. The last time we were in Nova Scotia we went back there. I still enjoy being next to the sea, to experience the light, the sound of the gulls, the magnifient rocks, and yes, even the other tourists.
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I’m totally addicted to the UK Sky Arts duo of Landscape Artist of the Year and Portrait Artist of the Year. As Frank Skinner, the original co-presenter of the shows said, “I love the idea that you can make great entertainment out of watching paint dry.”
If you are an artist or would be artist, it is a masterclass in and of itself. I have made changes to my own process from watching this show.
I feel sorry for the often amiable judges who no doubt endure ridicule and criticism for some of their decisions, albeit some of it deserved. That ridicule often comes from the co-presenters, who are sometimes baffled by their choices. Dame Joan Bakewell, one of the recent co-presenters, once suggested they may be trying to be the cool kids in their choice of winner. She looked incredulous at their pick.
I couldn’t watch the final program of the 2024 season when a young artist named Brogan Bertie won the competition. The season concludes with the winner going off to fulfill a prestigious commission for some gallery or institution, usually for the sum of 10,000 pounds.
Bertie struggled in the heat and the finals to capture a likeness, what should be the starting point for a successful portrait. He also appeared to have issues with perspective and proportion. Judge Tai Shan Shierenburg gushed how they had discovered an important new artist, when I think most of the world just recoiled, especially given it was by no reasonable means the best work of the competition.
I just couldn’t watch Bertie take on the commission. It felt like a betrayal. I noticed on one art BLOG that they thought it was too early to bestow such a recognition on an artist that young, especially when what he was doing was not so unique. In each episode the sitter gets to chose one of the paintings to take home. In this final, with Andy Serkis and Lorraine Ashbourne posing together, the couple tellingly didn’t pick Bertie’s work.
The format of the show is quite simple. In both cases a group of artists selected by a submission piece compete against each other in heats, allowed four hours to come up with a piece of work in front of the cameras.
Each heat in both shows has one winner go forward to the semi-finals. Most choose to paint, but the show has also had print makers, collage artists and many who chose to draw in various medium, including fabric, charcoal and coloured pencil.
In portrait artist, each episode the artists are broken into three groups of three to paint a specific celebrity sitter in a studio environment. Before a winner is decided, the celebrity sitters get to choose a portrait to take home with them.
In landscape artist, the competitors move around Britain to paint en plein air. In addition to six chosen competitors, the landscape program also includes about 50 so-called “wild card artists,” who are present to paint nearby the official group. At each heat an additional winner is selected among the wild cards, then from that group one is chosen by the judges to join the official competition at the semi-finals.
In both shows, from the semi-finals three artists are chosen to go forward to the finals, which also require an additional piece done with more time, kind of a homework assignment. The final winner gets the commission, of which a separate show is made about that process.
The judges do say odd things sometimes. Last night we watched one of the older landscape series. Shierenberg has a well-known aversion to things he describes as “chocolate box,” including boats and (in landscapes) people. He uses the word “twee” often. This gets particularly challenging when they set the competition in harbours or areas with lots of people roaming around, such as the episodes set along the waterfront in Liverpool.
In this particular episode, set at Chartwell House (former home of Winston Churchill) and its magnificent gardens in Kent, the sun was out, everybody looked happy, and the scenery was stunning. Surprisingly, one judge expressed disappointment that the watercolorist had not replicated the mood of her submission piece, feeling it could have been more creepy. Shierenberg took predictable issue with two figures in another painting that in my view gave it some scale as well as helped balance out the composition. Neither won that heat. To use one of their own overworked expressions, but what about a good honest bit of painting? What’s the point of plunking six artists plus another 50 in that kind of landscape then fault them for painting what they see and feel? One gets the distinct impression that they don’t do joy — after all, this is Britain.
John’s Italian (2011) Oil on Canvas (Private Collection)
As Shierenberg was going on about the figures in the one painting, comedian Stephen Mangan humorously suggested that the painting was still wet, they could simply wipe them out with a cloth. Easy! I suspect Mangan had written into his contract the ability to take the piss out of the judges when necessary.
These shows have been going for more than a decade now. It has crossed my mind that maybe they should be changing up the judging, but I do like the exchanges between the three judges: Kate Bryan, Kathleen Soriano and Shierenberg. They themselves are integral to the personality of the show and seem to have some self awareness when they cross the line into pretension.
Of course it is absolutely silly for artists to compete against one another, especially when they use different medium. But hats off to Sky for bringing a lot of attention to the visual arts in Britain through these programs. It gets people talking about art.
I have watched enough of the show now that I have a really good track record of predicting the winner of each heat, many of which I would choose myself.
Surprisingly, despite the judges, sometimes the works that emerge are truly joyful. It may not be the choice of the cool kids, but it still speaks to many people. It doesn’t have to look like a chocolate box to be joyful.
The other thing I like to remind my spouse, who watches it with me, is that we are only seeing the work mediated by television, not in the flesh. Most artworks looks very different in person, which is why you should still go to galleries. It also makes it more difficult for us to second guess the choices. But Brogan Bertie? Ugh.
Speaking of landscapes, today’s painting from my archive is another from my series of cafes, this one from John’s Italian on Baldwin Street in Toronto. As an epidemic of loneliness spreads in North America, seeing people clustered together and having a great time is a tonic. You might even call it joyful (wink, wink). This painting was one of a series I did exploring Baldwin Street, which used to be my destination for lunch-time walks while working downtown on Adelaide Street East in downtown Toronto.
In Canada you can watch both series (Landscape and Portrait) on Amazon Prime. There was also briefly a spin-off Landscape Artist of the Year (Canada) with Sook-Yin Lee. It debuted just before COVID. Say no more. You can find it on Tubi.
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What’s the point of making art if nobody ever looks at it?
Yesterday I spoke about four big changes in my work within the last year. This is the fifth: starting the process of developing an audience.
Sure, over the years people have collected my work (including the above piece) but I’ve never been able to take it to what I would conceive of as the next level. I’m wary of galleries that offer nothing but wall space, or worst still, charge you a fee for wall space. They do exist.
To sell a piece of work you need to be able to tell a story both about the piece and the artist. That makes it much more interesting. Art can speak for itself, but its better if someone skilled helps that process along.
The first strategy upon my “re-emergence” has been to respond to call for entries, and to anticipate such calls. Getting my work in front of curators is the name of the game, whether or not it leads to an exhibition opportunity. Yeah, I’ve already had polite letters telling me I didn’t make the cut, but to keep up the good work. Okay.
That strategy includes finding sources of call-for-entries. They can be call-outs for competitions or for entry into shows both virtual and in person.
Then there are calls for artist-in-residence positions. I noticed that Artnet posted a generous artist-in-residence position at a hotel in Mallorca. I dreamed about that for weeks.
The Oshawa Art Association recently put out a call for artists to paint in their tent during the city’s annual Convergence festival. The association works hard to open up opportunities, especially in a heavily populated region with next to no commercial galleries.
There is another site I visit regularly that looks at opportunities for public art commissions in the Greater Toronto Area, such as murals. I sometimes get overwhelmed doing a 30″ x 40″ painting, let alone a mural, but its nice to track what public opportunities are available.
Sometimes these calls are open, sometimes they require a prior membership in a group or gallery, or sometimes it is just a straight fee for entering into a competition or show. While an individual fee may be modest, it can add up, especially when the fee is per item being entered. Usually the fees are in the range of about $35 (Canadian) for the artist. I noticed one exhibition opportunity that offered a maximum of three entries at a cost $105 with no guarantee you’ll be chosen to participate in the show. Ouch.
Then there are the charitable opportunities, of which the cost to the artist is the painting or art work itself. By the time it is framed — and in some cases shipped — your direct costs can be in the range of about $150 or more to get in front of an audience. That doesn’t include your time. But it usually means someone will purchase the piece and hopefully take a greater interest in your work. These days I insert a promotional card in the back of the canvas to aid that process. The one drawback with charitable auctions is the bargain hunters can sometimes lower the value of your work. The price of your work is always based on what people are willing to pay for it, and a record of sales counts. Still, this is something that I have been pursuing, especially worthy charities I support that may also bring out the kind of crowd that values and collects art.
Years ago I participated in an event called “Paint The Town,” which was a fundraiser for the local arts centre in Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia. What was unusual about this one is that the proceeds were actually split 50-50 between the charity and the artist. Back when I was living in Halifax, it meant my costs of travelling up the valley and staying overnight were offset by my share of the sales. The event itself involved artists working en plein air throughout the town, then their works were transported wet in pizza boxes back to the gallery. At night there would be a silent auction. The organizers also made sure to serve us a dinner. Charities often forget that some of the worst compensated people in the arts are visual artists. One estimate I recently came across was the average compensation works out to be $19 per hour in Canada (I find it hard to believe it would even be that much). Paint the Town is still going more than 25 years later using that model.
Sometimes the nod to the artists is much more modest. I used to participate in the Little Art Show, a fundraiser for the Riverdale Art Walk in Toronto. The organizers would send you a blank canvas, the show requiring all submitted pieces to be 7″ x 9″. They put on a terrific event in the BMW dealership overlooking the Don Valley Parkway but it eventually fizzled out for reasons unknown. Maybe the regular crowd had more than enough 7″ x 9″ paintings.
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While filling out the forms for call-for-entries (there are always forms), I did note that often there is a request for a website address. It had been something I had been avoiding.
Recently reading Austin Kleon’s upbeat book Show Your Work I noticed the emphasis he placed on not only having a site, but posting to it daily.
Untitled (2013) Oil On Canvas(Private Collection)
I used to write a BLOG in my last day job which attracted an influential audience and opened the doors to connections with new groups in the community. In this new endeavour, I didn’t want to put up a static site with a bunch of my images on it. I wanted it to tell that story both about the work, the artist and my relationship to the art community. I also wanted to be a source of information for both curators and other would-be artists as to what being an emerging artist (or re-emerging artist) is like. It’s hard, but as Kleon urges, just keep going. If you have been following this BLOG I haven’t quite hit the daily posting mark, but it has been regular.
A friend of mine is convinced that galleries are only looking for young emerging artists. Certainly the ones we saw at Art Toronto fit that category. The inference is that I might be wasting my time. Seniors are the last group where discrimination appears socially acceptable, so he might be right.
Looking at the initial data on hits for this BLOG, including where in the globe they are coming from, it is both encouraging and discouraging. But I know from the last time I blogged it takes some time to develop an audience, and when you do, it can be very rewarding. I’m hoping my past experience will accelerate that process at least a little.
It’s great to make connections, including, I noticed, two individuals who have returned to this site from Norway. Us northern artists need to stick together!
One of the things I did remember from last time is to ask your readers to subscribe, to assign likes, and if they can, post a comment (BTW: Kleon disagrees). I have also sent emails and texts to individuals who I thought might like what I’m doing and subscribe. Some have, some haven’t.
What’s the end goal? I would eventually like to work with a commercial gallery. Listening to a panel of emerging artists at Art Toronto, it was interesting to hear them speak about the kind of relationship they had with their galleries. Again, its about more than just wall space.
So, that’s the plan. We’ll see what transpires.
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Rick Janson Art Studio 