Building blocks of art
Published Saturday April 3rd, 2010
Anna Cameron has always loved abstract art but she hasn't always painted it. At art school - she graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver in 1997 - she wanted to train her eye and learn to paint using representational images and ideas.
"With the representational work I set out to capture the light shining on a vase or the colours and translucency of skin," she says.
With abstracts, "it's about tossing all that away."
There's an exhilarating freedom to it, she says.
"Instead of working from a model or objects, I'm really relying on imagination, and I find the whole process to be more creative, from start to finish."
Her first exhibition of abstract paintings opens Friday at Gallery 78 in Fredericton. The large canvases in the show - most are about four feet squared - speak to her affinity for history, memory and landscape, although not in an explicit way.
Cameron has always been interested in geological events, how they change the land, "like souvenirs of events passed," she writes in her artist statement.
She uses blocks of colour to represent "different events, or different marks, all coming together to build up the canvas, build up the landscape, although I'm a little reluctant to call them landscapes, but I guess that's what they're based on."
She scratched lines across the tops of some of the paintings, "and I think of that as time, a timeline, some sort of tie back and tie forward through the time of the space."
There's a personal nostalgia at play in her work, too.
Her father grew up on a farm in Ontario. "It had been settled by Camerons who cleared the land and built the stone farmhouse way back when, and we still have quilts that my great-grandmother had been involved in making with her sisters and cousins and neighbours."
As a child, Cameron had those quilts on her bed.
"It would be so exciting to look at all the different patches of fabric that came from maybe somebody's dress or the curtains or used things that were put together, but there was a whole story there."
She isn't mimicking quilts - or anything else, for that matter.
"I just start with colour"‰..."‰I don't think I'm putting much thought into the definition of it all. I'm working with colour and balance and the rhythms of the brush stroke, and maybe thinking of some element of nostalgia."
Kate Wallace covers the arts for the Telegraph-Journal.
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