Weyburn's Allie Griffin Art Gallery is hosting a touring exhibition by artist Terry Fenton entitled "A Wide Horizon."
A dash of human habitation along a wide horizon: the separation line between earthly presence and heavenly essence: this is the Pallister Triangle grassland of Southwest Saskatchewan, captured in the oil paintings.
Navigating the secondary highways and grids on tips and instinct, Fenton toured and detoured around southwestern Saskatchewan. This area of extreme landscape is a challenge and an attraction for the bravest of artists. Intimate in scale, these works portray the Saskatchewan landscape in an evocative way: a way in which anyone who has experienced Saskatchewan's "living skies" can reminisce with at any given moment in time.
"I'm drawn south and west to the grasslandsbecause the colour and light there
is so luminous. Because the solutions found by painters from the past don't
work well in the wide-open spaces, I look for new ones" Saskatchewan artist
Terry Fenton explains.
Terry has documented his time travel through Saskatchewan with these paintings, capturing exact moments of uninterrupted views of land and sky. Yet they evoke a timeless quality.
Stare into Fenton's paintings of this tiny-featured land for a few minutes, and slowly, disconcertingly, an infinity forms in the spaces separating you, the painting and the absent-minded landscape. This strong horizontal format suggests a transitory moment, reminding us that the predominant view of contemporary landscape is from the window of a moving window.
Terry Fenton was born in Regina in 1940 and has been integrally involved in the development of the arts community on the Prairies for the past 35 years. A critic, author and curator, he has written numerous articles and books on Canadian & international art. He is now retired, and a full-time artist in Saskatoon.
