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Art has become recognized as an essential component in designing a modern home. When designing a space, interior designers often consider the importance of placing fine art in the home, to help provide a focal point, and further elevate the space.

The modern lobby design of The Peak, a newly built multi-residential development in West Vancouver, was inspired by Cori Creed’s colourful masterpiece “The Golden Hour”.  A large and vibrant coastal scene with gestural trees, skies and mountains, the painting grounds the space and connects viewers to Vancouver’s natural landscape. 

This warm and uplifting interior designed by Insight Design Group for British Pacific Properties expresses the relaxed beauty of the West Coast.  An abundance of natural light, warm wood, and soft furniture give the lobby a welcoming feel.  Jewel-toned accents such as pillows, and a multi-coloured and softly patterned rug, are thoughtfully introduced around the room, subtly reflecting tones in the artwork.  

“Often, when creating a piece, I have no idea where it will end up. In the process of visual storytelling, the site can be very important and it can be interesting to know what other elements will surround the piece before I begin. I also love the physical movement, specifically what that range of movement does for the brushwork, that larger pieces allow. The story that the painting tells up close is about process and creation, the story from a distance is about place and emotional response.” – Cori Creed

VIEW NEW WORK BY CORI CREED 

1) Can you tell me about the symbolism behind some of your different trees?

Since the image of a tree itself is highly symbolic I hope each person, regardless of cultural background, can assign meaning that is specific to themselves.   Each painting of a tree or trees plays with how the environment influences growth and life.  My trees show what interests me - the way that they respond to the impact of various stressors.  I often paint bent and twisted shapes.  I love how trees can somehow survive even the hardest conditions.  I think we all can associate our own paths through life with these shapes.

Trees also present us with “beauty”.  The concept of beauty has a long history and much has been written about it.  I often strive to address this notion with my work.

2) How does your commitment to ecological responsibility intertwine with your art practice?

I have planted and nurtured thousands of trees since I was a child.  When we first purchased acreage for a home & studio in Ontario my wife, (the artist Teresa Cullen), and I planted three empty hay fields with thousands of saplings.  Today they are a beautiful pine forest.  We’ve done the same at our current smaller property near Lake Simcoe.  I am an organic gardener too.  Sustainable living in a clean sustainable environment is essential.  My paintings usually infer this.  I hope they inspire people to be concerned and activist.

3) I read in your artist statement that deserts, mountains, and vast open plains serve as great inspiration for your artwork. Where do you search for sublime landscapes?

I find these places pretty much everywhere I travel; in Anatolia, Spain, the Prairies, Rockies and especially the American Southwest.  I find the landscape and trees interest me.  The more open the space, the better I like the way trees present themselves to me.

4) How has the artistic treatment of your work changed over the years and what triggers the shifts?

I began my professional career in the late 1970s and early 80s creating abstractions that alluded to landscapes.  At the time my wife and I shared a studio in a warehouse at King and Dufferin Streets in Toronto.  The city and the art scene certainly influenced my work. 

Once we relocated to the countryside north of Toronto (Grey County) the surrounding landscape challenged me to interpret it in ways that were unique to my new perceptions.  The work shifted somewhat so that horizon, sky, hills and trees became more recognizable while expressionistic paintwork was still important.  Trees gradually became more of a focus after planting so many of them.

When we moved and built a second studio, in Oro Medonte ON in 1998, there was a giant sugar maple tree on the property.  That grand dame was nicknamed “The Queen”.  Living under her shifted my focus to trees as my main subject.  The painterly treatment has varied over the years in response to my interests in methods of making paintings, from allusions to representation in a traditional sense.  Recently, I’ve been playing with ambiguous color backgrounds as foils for tree forms.

5) Your tree paintings have a calming and meditative effect and I think this is partly because of the removal of all non-essential visual elements in their compositions.  Can you tell me about the process of reduction in your work?

A few years ago I became interested in how I could strip down my paintings to emphasize mostly the tree.  I played around for a year or two with abstracted backgrounds.  Some of these backgrounds were resolved paintings in themselves even before the tree was painted in.  This was tricky because sometimes the background became more interesting than the main subject. 

Over time I’ve worked to pare down the backgrounds to play a supporting role, like the grounding tones in a musical piece (think the rhythm section in a jazz performance). I have a strong interest in visual art that is grounded in spiritual dimensions, with an emphasis on images and objects that help us to suspend thinking and experience what’s present.  There are some Asian ink wash paintings that really inspire me. "Pine Trees" by Hasegawa Tōhaku (Japanese, 1539–1610) is one of my favorites.

 VIEW WORK BY ROBERT MARCHESSAULT

Jamie Evrard has spent this autumn season in her pied-à-terre near Tuscany cycling through the countryside and gathering new landscape inspiration for painting. In this candid interview, she shares a glimpse of her adventures and artistic process.

1) What have you been working on lately? 

Well, my friend Florence and I just spent eight days on a bike trip in Sud Tirol and Alto Adige Provinces up in northern Italy.  We biked along the Mincio and Adige Rivers as biking along a river is usually easier and less steep than taking a random route through the mountain.  We stopped frequently to take photos of the turquoise blue water reflecting the trees along the shore.
I’m painting landscapes and reflections. The light is so beautiful here, along with the view out my window.  I’m getting all caught up in the dreamy imaginary qualities of reflections and the impossible tangle of old-growth forests, and am especially loving painting something completely different.

2) Where in Italy are you located and how often do you go there?

My house is located in the Val di Pierle just east of Cortona in Tuscany.  This is a very humble, down to earth area where people farm corn, sunflowers, and tobacco.  People work with their hands and talk a lot about food.  My friends are carpenters and stonemasons with the odd expat thrown in.

3) What do you find most inspiring about working in Italy?

There are several things that I love about working here.  One is that life is simpler...no double shot, extra hot, double cup soy lattes, just un espresso.  A small selection of old clothes with the odd piece from the 3 Euro table at the market, a car whose hubcaps have disappeared and long days to garden and paint with nary a phone call.  My last three phone calls were from a seamstress whose kid got a hold of her phone and dialed me my mistake.  The food is beautiful—hot sweet tiny tomatoes from our neighbor’s garden and yesterday a big haul of porcini mushrooms which they shared with us.  Simplicity and emptiness can be inspiring.  Having hours strung together without distraction is the best thing about this place.  And the warm, golden quality of the light.

4) Can you tell us about your creative process?  Are there any Italian artists that have influenced your work?
I usually take care of errands and odd jobs in the morning and paint in the afternoon.  I paint in my bedroom here and move the furniture around to accommodate my easel and palette so that I can be right in front of the window overlooking the valley
Oh yeah, my “process”.  I’m painting oils on Arches oil paper which I have never liked but do now for the inexpensive freedom it gives me to try all sorts of things.  I stick up a piece and mark off a 20 by 20-inch square and choose a photo from the summer to explore.  Sometimes I finish a sketch in a couple of hours, sometimes I work on a piece for a few sessions.  Since the subject of the landscape is so new to me and the paper is too, I’m really enjoying not having a clue how to approach it.  If a day’s work has been particularly stressful, I’ll go out to the garden and move some rocks or tear up a blackberry or nettle patch.
               
5) I imagine you have visited lots of art museums, famous art sites/ cultural spots during your time there. Do you have any favorites?
I particularly love the Etruscan Museums in the area—Chiusi and Cortona to name two.  The Etruscans were such mysterious people and created with great abandon.  I can just imagine a bunch of sculptors sitting around in the studio and one of them saying, "Hey guys let’s put deer hooves on the next candelabra.” 
I also love to see anything by Piero della Francesca, a Renaissance painter whose work is timeless and deceptively simple.  His Legend of the True Cross in Arezzo, and The Pregnant Madonna, The Deposition from the Cross are nearby.  Sometimes I see someone walking down the street and think they could have just walked out of a Piero piece.  That’s how vital his figures are. I have a couple of artist friends who live around here whose work I admire but the contemporary art scene here is basically nonexistent.
 
6) What would be your dream project?
Figuring out how to turn my landscape sketches into large paintings. 

VIEW WORK BY JAMIE EVRARD

Andre Petterson is a multi-media artist who attempts to capture the essence of a split-second in time.  Over the past year, he has been working on a new series to document his perspective of the changing landscape of Vancouver’s lower mainland.  His fascination with observing machines and factories and their integration into the urban environment was a starting point for the series.

“All cities are in a constant state of change.  The pockets of change that have taken place since I moved here in 1970 from Saskatoon draw my attention.  Neighborhoods, both residential and industrial, have gone through such flux, that sometimes is so slow that things happen that go unnoticed for a long time. Sometimes, the changes are so fast that it boggles the mind.” Through these snapshots he poses the question, how do we maintain a physical and emotional balance as inhabitants of a city that is undergoing rapid urbanization?

Human figures are introduced into some of the artworks and stand facing monolithic found objects such as cranes, high-rises, mountains of sulfur to highlight our coexistence with the built world and illustrate how we view and question our unpredictable landscape.  Through scale and placement, Peterson juxtaposes the observer with their surroundings to convey the emotional effect urbanization has on us when we stop and ‘take it all in’.

Peterson has captured this feeling in his mixed media works that depict the sulfur mounds in North Vancouver and Port Moody.  Having photographed them repeatedly over time, he has noticed their permanence, despite the encroachment of surrounding neighborhoods and infrastructure towards them. The piles remain the same while the city develops and grows around them, creating a visual contrast between past and present. 

This exploration of the tensions and constant flux within our surrounding urban landscape is re-imagined through Andre Petterson’s distinct mixed media methodology, collage and photo manipulation.  “I take photographs of things that I find or construct.  I enjoy building, painting and arranging objects into still life scenes. I then digitally alter them on the computer, layering things together and then printing multiple images which I then fix to panels. I then paint directly onto the image. Sometimes, what looks painted, is part of the photograph and sometimes, the reverse. Using mixed mediums opens up the art making process for me and eliminates restrictions.”

His upcoming show Balance will be opening at Bau-Xi Vancouver on October 19, on view until November 2^nd.

VIEW COLLECTION 

Canadian artist Sheri Bakes on her newest series, Empathy for the Earth.  Bakes invites us into her creative process and gives us a glimpse of the magical setting that inspired her latest artworks.

1. How do you place your work within the context or lineage of Canadian Art History?

When I was relearning how to paint I was looking a lot at both Impressionism and also the Group of Seven painters, including Emily Carr's work. After sitting with this work, I started to wonder what's missing. What is missing and what can I do to expand on what they were doing so I can be a contribution to the history of art. 

Over time I've thought about this a lot. In my earlier work you can see the red trees are a reference to the work of A.Y. Jackson and the handling of brushwork attempts, more and more, to draw on some of what was going on in Vincent Van Gogh's work that relates to physics, specifically on the concept of turbulent flow in fluid dynamics. 

2. Which artists have had the most profound influence on you and how have you diverged and developed your own unique imagery?

There are so many. I think Georges Braque and Paul Cézanne had a huge influence on my thinking and work in that they flipped point perspective onto one picture plane and created the painting for itself, as a flat surface. I've been really interested in taking that idea, along with more traditional point perspective ideas of receding space and combining them both to create a sort of "window/wall" effect combined in one painting. 

An example of this is when you look at ponds with lily pads and koi fish…the lily pads are the flat wall-like parts, and the more translucent parts that you can travel into are the areas with the koi swimming below the surface of the water. I really like the impact and combination of both of these perspectives together in one piece. 

Van Gogh has been a big influence both in his work and in his writings. His cognitive ability to abstract was incredible and I find both his words and work an endless source of inspiration. 

The Group of Seven in their focus on Canadian landscape. I love this work and I try to take this direction and marry some of these ideas with what Van Gogh, Braque and Cézanne were doing. 

Lastly, I also very often look through the work of the Leningrad School of painters as I love the loose poetic melancholy in so much of this work. 

3. You are well known for your pointillist technique in your paintings. Could you describe your methodology and the philosophy behind it?

 I do understand the "pointillist" connection in regards to art history, but for me it has more to do with physics. It has to do with the space between the painting and the viewer and trying to depict that space, too.  I think so often we just focus on the three points of the artist/painting/viewer triangle but I'm equally as interested in the spaces between the points. That's what the focus on wind has been about too; the atmosphere and space between.  

4. Is the luminous glow in your paintings an element you intentionally create and can you tell us about it?

For me light is the base or root of everything. In my spiritual practice this is where everything starts and everything comes from. It's a constant for me. The ideas and illusions between light and matter is pretty interesting to play with inside a context of "wind and weather." Matter can distort and block out the light in areas or create translucent veils, but ultimately the canvases are all painted with 15 layers of white gesso underneath and that is the light base metaphor for all of the work. Just like a prism fractures light into colours, the source of those fractures is one white light.

5. The colours in a lot of your past works had bright and electric hues but the artworks in this show have a softer palette. What is the reason for this transition? 

Sometimes colour shifts have to do with something I want to learn in paint mixing or a feeling I want to experience more of. In this show I've wanted to explore subtly and space to create work that is more quiet but hopefully just as powerful. I suppose I wanted to create more of an awareness through more listening. 

6. You mentioned that your studio is located on several acres of farmland and that a lot of your paintings from your latest “Empathy for the Earth” series depict different views of it.  Can you describe this landscape and how it inspires you?

I'm currently living on 54-56 acres of farmland on Vancouver Island with highland cows and black Canadian Horses. It's a pretty dynamic atmosphere both in land and weather. There are 5-6 distinctly unique large fields plus trees and pathways from the animals and creeks that run between them. A variety of fruit trees, a lake below my studio in the winter and it empties out in the summer to create a lush field and there is a mountain range further off behind that. There really is a lot to draw from here as things change daily both in weather and in ground. I suppose for me inspiration is like light; it's a constant and not something that is separate. There will be a lot to draw from in any environment.

7. Can you tell us about the new (bird-like) brush marks in some of these new works?

I was experimenting with a painting from my last show called Serendipity's Run where I wanted to create the feeling I experienced from watching the newly arrived Trumpeter Swans stop in along their migration path. They landed in the lake below my studio one night and I woke up to what sounded like a lot of beeping. They stayed for quite a while as they rested and foraged. Both their vocal and massive wing sounds commanded attention. In this show I wanted to recreate a similar piece in large scale, just to experience a larger version of that same feeling. 

8. Does music or literature play a role in your painting process? 

Yes, I think it would have to. I wanted to play music but I just didn't have the right training or confidence. My father was classically trained in violin from age seven to sixteen and then switched to guitar. He played a variety of instruments on his own and in bands up until a couple years ago. This had a very big impact on me growing up, and now I try to create music in my work…a kind of visual sound that the brain can feel but can't exactly hear. I hope to create work that can touch the brain as music does but with visual sound. 

9. When do you decide a painting is complete?

 For me it's the same as making dinner. Decide what you want, put it together, maybe it needs a bit more pepper or salt, or apple cider vinegar or ginger... maybe some olive oil. Your taste buds will know when it's done, or done enough to be a satisfying meal. I paint the same way as making food. 

10. What are you excited about painting in the next few months ahead?

Learning, growing, and being able to keep painting. 

VIEW COLLECTION

Recently we chatted with Eric Louie about the mural design he completed for the lobby of Facebook’s Vancouver office.  He was one of two local artists selected for the Facebook Artist in Residence Program to create an original mural for the company’s headquarters and was given the timeline of 1 week to complete it.

1. What was your concept for the mural?

My goal was to convey a sense of life in motion. I envisioned the mural and the bustling and transient lobby space as a portal to a virtual world and wanted to transform the elevators into flood gates leading into the expansive space.

2. Did you face any challenges while creating the mural?

I found the large scale of the mural to be a challenge but the hardest part was painting with acrylic. The quick drying time of this type of paint made things difficult as I’m heavily reliant on blending techniques...I had to work fast and improvise my approach to achieve a similar effect on the wall as I do in my oil paintings. I also cut directly onto the wall’s surface using exacto blades which was tricky because of the drywall’s tendency to flake.

3. Have you worked on any murals in the past?

This was my 4th mural.  I have done a couple murals in town that year for Granville Island (Art Smash in the Forge space) and for Strathcona Brewery. The creative director for the Vancouver Mural Festival helped set up these opportunities for me which I think led to my presence online as a candidate for Facebook.  

4. Can you describe your creative process with this project?

After some brief design planning and a digital project proposal, I began painting. I have always worked from a contemplative approach where taking time to reflect and edit is important.  I’m not good at being a designer who comes up with an image and executes it to a tee, but instead like to get into the moment and see where things go unexpectedly. I thought it seemed gutsy to improvise on such a big project but I had to trust in my ability as an artist to follow through. 

“Art should always be a surprise otherwise what is the point?”

VIEW VIDEO

VIEW MORE WORK BY ERIC LOUIE