Avenue Magazine Edmonton

Hallucinatory Depictions

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Essential Subjects

If they gave an artistic award for the biggest shift in subject matter, painter Tom Gale would win in a heartbeat. The long-time Edmonton artist was best known in the ’80s and early ’90s for a popular series of post-modern paintings depicting Greek ruins and classical statuary — work inspired by a life-altering trip to Italy. That changed 15 years ago after a trip to Canada’s North, which convinced him that natural vistas were his essential subject matter. “I switched and never looked back,” he says. More than just switching over to landscapes, Gale also became a great fan of local — and not very artistically romantic — scrub brush and humble aspen trees. “In aspen trunks I see little abstract paintings. I love the way they absorb the light and change by the season, by the hour.” Gale’s work is always showing at the Front Gallery. thefrontgallery.com

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Japanese Fate

A lot of planning goes into large-scale shows at the Art Gallery of Alberta, but synchronicity also plays a part. The fickle finger of fate pointed right at AGA Head Curator Catherine Crowston when Arlene Hall sauntered over to her at the opening of the China Sensation exhibit and asked if she was interested in historic photos documenting the volatile and transformative  last years of Edo Japan (roughly 1860s to 1890s). “I was staggered that this collection existed in Edmonton,” Crowston says of the iconic photographs in Koshashin: The Hall Collection of 19th Century Photographs of Japan. The photographs are showing alongside The 53 Stations of the Tokaido Road, which features 1834 woodblock prints by Ando Hiroshige, until June 7 at the Art Gallery of Alberta. artgalleryalberta.com

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Landscape Royalty

It should come as no surprise that Catherine Perehudoff practises her craft, given that she is the child of Western Canadian painting royalty. Daughter to iconic painter Dorothy Knowles and renowned abstract modernist painter William Perehudoff, she is also married to fellow landscape painter Graham Fowler. “I always had access to materials, as well as a critical assessment of my work,” she says. Given this background and the confidence that comes with it, Perehudoff has no problem focusing on mundane prairie vistas (including unromantic sloughs, barren spring fields and tiny northern lakes), which she revisits over and over again to create her colourful landscapes. Working the Landscape, Two Views shows alongside the work of Catherine McAvity from May 9 to May 21 at the Agnes Bugera Gallery.  agnesbugeragallery.com

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Inspired Views

Wendy Wacko is not one of those deep-realist landscape painters. This widely travelled documentary filmmaker-cum-landscape-painter has captured vistas from all over the world on canvas — Ireland, Hawaii, Tuscany and Costa Rica, as well as the mountains around her Jasper Park home-base — in a profoundly intuitive fashion. Her medium- to large-scale oil paintings are less about academic realism than impressionist colours, loose brushstrokes, soft forms and contours — a subjective world view. So it comes as no surprise that she would find a wellspring of inspiration in her extensive painting-oriented trips to the Queen Charlotte Islands. “You’re sitting and gazing at some incredible vistas and finding it hard not to imagine the war canoes and beating drums,” she says. Wacko’s second showing of Queen Charlotte-inspired art runs from May 9 to 26 at the Scott Gallery. scottgallery.com