MIDDLE GROUND: Jane Harington & Dawna Rose
Reception: Saturday, June 10, 2 - 4 PM
May 12 - June 22
Art Placement is pleased to bring together recent works by Jane Harington and Dawna Rose, two Saskatoon-based painters mining the fertile middle ground between abstraction and representation. Both artists work mostly in oils with stylistic vocabularies that are loose, gestural, and painterly. Over the course of their careers, Harington and Rose have each explored a number of subjects and genres, including landscapes, still-lifes, florals, and figures. Recently, and independently of one another, both artists have been making work that is increasingly abstract. Their paintings maintain some connection to recognizable subjects, though that connection often slips away as the works become more about feeling, intuition, visual play, and aesthetic balance, and less about depiction or representation. The resulting works are colourful, dynamic, and engaging. The lingering essence of a subject gives the works some grounding, a sense of where the paintings began. The finished paintings allow us to appreciate the creative journey that brought each work to its conclusion.
Jane Harington Artist Statement:
I always find it hard to describe my work. Large floral seems somehow inadequate yet, that is what they are. I’ve tried to leave the floral reference out but then am left with ‘abstract with floral undertones’ - not quite right either! So I’ve decided to embrace the massive floral overtones of this new series and celebrate their joie de vivre.
Several of this series are diptychs or companion pieces. The balance and flow between them working with the energy and expressiveness of each piece. There’s a quiet against a dense entanglement, a breath against a riot. They are all reflective of my interior monologue - the voice in my head, the sound of my thoughts. The constant wonder and worry that is our world and how to understand, navigate and process it.
Painting is deeply meditative for me. I paint quickly, with rapid brushstrokes, making marks that lead me into the work. Often, I reach a dead end but there’s always another mark, another way to bring me back to the surface, to the beauty, to the lushness, to the mystery.
Dawna Rose Artist Statement:
This latest series, Rock/brain, began in August 2021 at a Pouch Cove foundation residency in Newfoundland. I had a couple of small panels with me that morphed into rock mound shaped abstracts. The paintings were influenced by the environment I was in and my daily walks along the East Coast trail which was a mere 15 minutes from my studio. Concurrently I had begun a meditation course which I accessed daily online through an app. The app not only conducted a daily 20 minute meditation but had innumerable talks about neurology and the brain which I found quite captivating having never really investigated my own.
Upon returning to Saskatoon I continued to transform both new and old panels into these lump like shapes, structures similar to the paintings I had started in Pouch Cove. Initially the paintings seemed like landscapes, or lumps in a landscape but eventually the shape reminded me more and more of brains ( with a lot of stuff going on inside them) placed in a space. I admit to listening to the meditation app while painting. Sometimes they reminded me of portraits, obviously not traditional ones but rather more like brain scans. This work grew to include 38 panel pieces of various sizes that I travelled around Saskatoon with to three different residencies over the past 6 months. I worked on all the panels simultaneously. The working method was a form of addition and subtraction. Sometimes adding paint and sometimes using solvent or a palette knife to remove paint. Each decision on each piece created a subsequent decision. The narrative and physical structure of the painting became slightly less important as the process of painting took over but the final work would not have had the same emotional or visual heft for me if they hadn’t started with the lump, the landscape and the inner workings of a mysterious brain.
