KEN WALLACE - RCA
Ken Wallace was born in Penticton, B.C. in 1945. He attended the Alberta College of Art, and the Banff School of Fine Arts on scholarship. He graduated with honours in animation and painting from the Vancouver School of Art (now E.C.I.A.D.) in 1973. Wallace has taught painting and drawing at the University of British Columbia in the Faculty of Education and Department of Fine Arts, Continuing Studies. He currently teaches at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. His work is represented in numerous prestigious private and public collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada Council Art Bank, CBC, National Gallery of Canada, and the Vancouver Art Gallery.
"Meaning in art is increasingly externalized by theoretical constructs that have made it difficult for the viewer to form personal responses. However, human experience is inseparable from nature, therefore landscape painting should be looked at through the duality of both physical existence and the meaning of nature in the subconscious. These landscapes are not of specific locations rather they are representations of the idea of nature for contemplation."
Artistic Statement
My engagement with landscape painting is an interpretation of the human connection to nature. The subject of my interest in landscape are the fertile still water marshes, the source of life, sublime primordial cosmos of the union of land and water. I digress from the traditional landscape horizon perspective viewpoint and spatial relationship to a more compressed intimate scale. The sky is often reflected in the lower portion of the composition. The junction where land and water meet offer endless potential for variations of shape, colour and textural interpretations. This subject provides an inspirational arena for exploration and expression in the “ act “ of painting. Nature becomes paint and paint becomes nature. One brush stroke, one blade of grass. The paint is intuitively as well as consciously applied to develop the intrinsic elements that are the intersection of the subject and the interpretive manifestation of the painted image. I experience these paintings as a duality of the physical existence of the properties of the painting and metaphorical meaning of the image in our subconscious. These works are not intended to be duplications of specific situations, rather they serve as representations of the idea of nature for contemplation as well as experienced on an aesthetic level.
Fresh water is a life necessity rapidly being recognized as the most valued and sought after resource. It is endangered by pollution, politics and wasteful mismanagement. As a contemporary urban society we tend to distance ourselves from nature. It is my desire that these paintings may serve as reminders, no matter how brief that human experience is inseparable from nature.
|