These two exhibitions celebrate the works of Jean McEwen, Ted Godwin, Kenneth Lochhead, and Harold Town, and their contribution to the art world. It showcases the boldness and innovation that these artists possessed and the courage to challenge the status quo. It is a testament to the power of art to shape and change our world and to the power of the individual to make a difference.

Red: The colour of Love - a group Exhibition.

This exhibition is a playful concept on RED. With so many wonderful artists working and using the colour, it seemed appropriate to highlight and feature the various ways it is used in art to compliment the up-coming Valentine’s season. Works by various of our gallery artists, include; David Alexander, Simon Andrew, David Newkirk, Steve Mennie, Harold Town, Robert Lemay, Phil Darrah, Bruce Head, Diana Zasadny, and more.

Drawing on her love of textiles, Milne chose to call the exhibition Woven likening it to a length of woolen tweed, a seemingly simple warp and weft construction which, upon closer scrutiny, proves to be an increasingly complex and seductive read. Such is the case here. In these paintings, what might appear as a singular colour from a distance, reveals itself to be overlapping colours, tones, lines and shapes. The juxtaposition of the unexpected. A surface may be transparent in some areas yet richly built up in others. In Milne’s work the close up and distant views are presented simultaneously, resulting in landscapes that are both intimate in the form of a garden and majestic such as the glacier at Lake Louise.

Several paintings are centred on the exuberance of blossoms, their ephemeral beauty, and their eventual demise. Each flower is a vehicle of change, of what we experience and observe in our own lives. Certain passages are descriptive while others are abstract. Lustre is surrounded by tension and interference. Through the microcosm of a single bloom or an isolated tree, one sees into a larger unsettling world. Beauty is explored in the tradition of Vanitas painting, there is an awareness of the fleetingness of existence.

“Through editing and amplification of details, I am looking at the experience of wonder. I have long been aware of our fragile relationship to the land, pondering ideas of stewardship and vulnerability. In these works, we are ever reminded of temporality - of presence and absence - nature as we encounter it and as we remember it.” - Milne