The Godfrey Dean Art Gallery is kicking off 2013 with a new art show by a local artist. Sarah Jane Fougere has a new exhibition of paintings on display at the gallery.
The work is a mix of portraits and landscape paintings, most of which are "painted from life," quickly painted to capture the people and scenes in a natural place.
The style developed from a series depicting 100 Calgary artists. Fougere says that the project was a great jumping off point, allowing her to develop her style and learn as she worked with the different artists in the area. That project lead to Fougere continuing to paint quickly and sometimes in a live setting. She says that painting rapidly is something which she feels makes the paintings more direct and better able to capture what she sees.
"I like to see a painting with really fast brush strokes, almost like a train of thought... It's almost like every little mark you make is a letter in the alphabet describing your surroundings and I see my paintings as a short essay. There's not too much rendering, you can see the process and thought pattern that makes the picture whole," she says.
She says that speed is also important for portraits just for the sake of the people sitting for them. Her goal was to make it go quickly because it's hard to ask people she doesn't know to sit for such a long period.
"If I can get it to be the length of a movie, I can say 'you can sit for a movie right? Let me paint your picture."
At the opening, Fougere painted a portrait live, and she says that portraits are rewarding not just for the work, but for the shared experience between her and the model. She says that in some cases, she has become life-long friends with people she met through the portraits.
"It's an actual meeting and an encounter, and I think that brings something to the work as well."
Many of the paintings are on masonite, which Fougere says she uses for a combination of convenience and aesthetic reasons. She says that part of the reason is because they fit well in her painting box, but also because it allows her to work with the material instead of fighting with it. She says that the brown of the masonite is a neutral color that can work well with the look she is trying to achieve.
Fougere has moved back into the area recently, and says that it's great to be back. She's enjoying the opportunity to work more for herself and continuing evolving as an artist. She says that she's grateful for the opportunities that a show at the Godfrey Dean can represent, and she hopes to connect with people in the area more as she continues to work.
The immediate future has Fougere working on her next show, taking some of her smaller paintings from a time spent in Alaska and turning them into larger, more ambitious pieces. She says that the paintings in the field are there to capture a moment and place, and the larger work will be used to flesh it out and make a more layered and striking.
