Reviews of theatre and art in Nova Scotia and beyond
November 16, 2024
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Standing in front of Janice Leonard’s landscapes and Mary Reardon’s still life paintings, on view at Secord Gallery to Nov. 22, I feel my shoulders drop and my breath regulate.
In these turbulent, worrisome times, their exhibit, A Sense of Time, is a wonderfully relaxing show.
These two artists, who are friends, have very different styles and genres but both create contemplative art about memory and time. The two give a talk at the gallery, 6301 Quinpool Road, today, Saturday, Nov. 16, 1 to 3 p.m.
Reardon’s minimalist still life paintings, in a pale palette, are atmospheric, theatrical sets of recurring objects placed sparingly in a vast, deliciously-open space, against a sky or a wall, or on the palest beach sand.
Her objects – a silver cup, a red mug, marbles, bird feathers, empty nests, exquisitely painted glass jars – have a weighted symbolism as she draws on the still life tradition of using objects as symbols.
“Throughout the history of visual arts the bird has been used to represent the human soul – what is essentially our memories,” Reardon says in her artist statement. “Following in that tradition, I use the feather to represent that essential element of our lives.”
Her containers “represent the physical mind and how it functions as it holds, or fails to hold, those memories. The depiction of objects in reflective surfaces introduces another level of symbolism by speaking to the mental act of, literally, reflecting.” Her intent is to create a visual metaphor “for how the mind looks at the moment when something is remembered or forgotten.”
The act of memory is crucial to identity; as I watch my mother-in-law slip into Alzheimer’s I see how her connections to the objects she has collected over her lifetime trigger positive memories – her mother’s paintings of her Annapolis Valley home, the Inuit sculptures she sold at her Halifax craft shop, the large, chunky, colourful jewelry she bought in the Caribbean. They are not just things; they contain her memories and her personality.
The associations people bring to Reardon’s objects will affect their experience of the work. Silver is antique and goes back to the days of grandparents and to traditions of silver christening cups and wedding gifts; the red mug, for me, represents a campfire mug and the act of storytelling (the release of memories) around a campfire; the circular marbles while being a restful shape take me back to childhood and also can express the entire world as a tiny globe.
Whatever the individual associations, Reardon’s technical skill is amazing and her paintings’ soulfulness highly compelling. She has a gift for painting reflection and a wonderful clarity in defining her objects.
Janice Leonard, having her first show at Secord Gallery after leaving Katzman Art Projects (formerly Studio 21), fills the room with the light and glory of the Annapolis Valley landscape that she experiences in her ancestral home of Paradise, N.S.
Leonard, who received her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1981, and has exhibited widely since then, still finds the magic, energy and excitement, as well as the pure beauty, in a land she knows intimately and has painted many times.
Her postcard series of small paintings on wood are like keeping a diary – an act of memory. They are also, as she says in her statement, like sending a message to a friend, which is sharing a memory. She stamps these treasures with the time, date and place of when and where she experienced the land and the light as she draws on her iphone photos and her journal entries. To further evoke both the present and the past, Leonard handwrites her impressions of the moment on the back of each painting.
Leonard is a master at light and as a student was looking at the Northern symbolists, the Hudson River School and Emily Carr whose landscapes she finds “incredibly spiritual.”
Her work is poetic, spiritual and sublime. Her paintings are a visceral experience of the land. Her love for this land and the energy and spirit she brings to express it are visible in how she constructs a painting and how she works with her tools.
The acrylic paintings have a wide range of times of day, light conditions and colour though her palette is generally muted and earthy. Leonard varies her strokes from blended to highly visible and energized. Paradise, Aug. 4, 2022, 6:45 p.m., has a wash of lemony light above the suggestion of a mountain and tree tops below with an exciting density of dark varied colour at the base of the trees before they give way to a meadow.
She can find beauty in the bare branches and flatter colours of spring in Paradise – March 22, 2023, 9:21 a.m. The rust of a wide turning road in Paradise Lane, Looking West, (Diptych) is in beautiful contrast to the light yellows and greens of meadow and trees.
Leonard’s family roots in Paradise go back to the 1700s. There she experiences a “sense of timelessness: a place of many histories ….,” she says is in her statement. “The phenomenon of time passing and the romance of its history give the land an anxious sensibility.”
She quotes Susan Sontag: “The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of the subjects making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.”
Both artists evoke the passage of time but also make it stand still for viewers as they spend time experiencing the artists’ worlds.
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Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Art, artist, exhibition, exhibitions, painting
