Artists Wendy Butters (top left), Jane Kelly (top right), and Darcy Jackson (bottom) with a few of their paintings from the Mosaics of Life exhibit in Dawson Creek, running until September 10. Michaela Garstin / Dawson Creek Daily News photo.
By: Michaela Garstin, Dawson Creek Daily News
The Dawson Creek Art Gallery is now showing Mosaics of Life, an exhibit of art and painting that has intertwined with the lives of three featured artists.
Artists Darcy Jackson, Jane Kelly and Wendy Butters are each showing around 50 paintings that have been influenced from life experiences, dealing with topics including religion, the environment and ethnicity.
The show opened on August 16 and continues until Sept. 10. The painting are all for sale, ranging from $75 to $500. Most are under the $200 mark.
“My husband and I spend a lot of time in the back country, so I paint a lot of landscapes,” said Kelly, an impressionist artists from Tumbler Ridge.
She is inspired by the rhythm of trees, lakes, rivers and mountains in the Peace Region.
Her watercolour on canvas painting Grizzlies in the Sukunka Valley features three bears moving across colourfully layered hills.
Kelly used a photo a friend took of the bears to recreate the animals, and painted the lush impressionistic background behind them.
The artist has been painting since eighth grade, after her grandmother bought her an oil painting set for Christmas.
She now focuses on watercolours and has started applying an acrylic topcoat so her paintings don’t have to be displayed under glass.
Tumbler Ridge artist Darcy Jackson paints primarily portraits using bright watercolours.
Jackson’s large mosaic painting Face of the Savior is covered in more than 400 miniature paintings she previously created and depicts Jesus’ face from a distance.
“I like how you can see the detail of each painting up close but you don’t get a sense of the whole painting until you move further away. Then you notice the face you are actually looking at.”
The deep red, orange and black painting was made using the innovative computer program Andrea’s Mosaics.
She printed the completed design in sections and painted an orange-coloured border around the artwork.
“I do a lot of children’s paintings and a lot of different nationalities and ethnicities,” Jackson said about her painting Tibetan Twins, which depicts two young children huddled close together.
She used many different art techniques to create the watercolour painting, including stamping and blowing with straws.
Jackson said another painting, Mother Theresa, is more her usual style.
“I painted her because she is an example of love and kindness and giving to the poor – things we can all learn from,” she said about the lifelike painting.
Her Mother Theresa watercolour painting depicts an aged woman in pale blue with a striking gaze.
Jackson said the local artistic community provides a lot of support for artists.
“The artistic community is small, but we’ve all bonded together. We hangout and we all paint together. We learn from each other too.”
The artist said she would like to find homes for all her artwork because she is currently creating a lot of paintings.
“I have a lot of inspiration right now, and I’m painting more lately,” she said.
Wendy Butters, an intuitive impressionistic artist from Hinton, Alta., primarily paints landscapes and animals.
“I live in an outdoor camp for three months in the fall, and I get my inspiration from this a lot.”
Butters has lived in Alberta her whole life, but moved to Hinton 10 years ago.
Her landscapes are from Alberta but turn out to look remarkably similar to those in the Peace Region, the artist said about her small-sized paintings.
Butters paints animals she sees in real life while on her yearly retreat.
“When you’re out there, it’s just you and the landscape. It becomes your companion”.
