Toronto-based artist Barbara Cole spoke with Cottage & Gardens about her career and her most recent series, Surfacing. 

Serena Norr, for Cottages & Gardens, August 2019 

Get to Know Underwater Photographer, Barbara Cole

Barbara Cole has had quite an impressive and impactful career. Read on to learn more about her in our latest interview:

Tell us more about your journey as an artist?

I am completely speechless about the trajectory my career has taken. I dropped out of high school when I was 17 years old because I was suffering from depression and anxiety. This was back in the sixties when nobody talked about such things. I worked as a model to fill in the time while I tried to figure out what the next step would be. Oddly enough I modeled for a start-up newspaper who took me on as a “fashion editor” the next year.

I traveled to the shows in Europe and the states and wrote articles. The photographers at the newspaper trusted my eye during the fashion shoots and they thought I could do a decent enough job. (That would free them up to cover the “news” stories where they could be noticed). I was fine with that and picked up a set of cameras/learned darkroom and basically began my career. After ten years at the newspaper I was given a three-month sabbatical during which time I created my first art show. I was taken on by a great Canadian gallerist and have been exhibiting ever since.

What have been some of the highlights of your career?

Fortunately, there have been many moments in my career that standout. Throughout my journey as an artist, I have teamed up with some incredible organizations. Most recently, I have been working with Bell Let’s Talk and the Campaign to Change Direction to further their initiatives in spreading awareness and de-stigmatizing mental health issue through my art. I have also proudly become a “clean water ambassador” for SWIMDRINKFISH– a local group helping to protect our water from plastics and pollution.

Since the majority of my work utilizes water, this foundation is especially near and dear to me. On more personal endeavors, in 1995, I participated in a touring museum exhibition about Breast Cancer called Survivors in Search of a Voice: The Art of Courage, Centre. It meant a lot to me because my dear friend and aunt had just succumbed to the disease. Subsequently, I was commissioned by the M. Lau Breast Cancer Centre at Princess Margaret Hospital to place my art in their space.

In 2005, I was invited to exhibit my series, underwater series Underworld, in Tokyo, Japan at the Canadian Embassy and then after that at the Canadian Embassy in Washington DC. And in 2008 I won the Grand Prix, le 6ème Festival International de la Photographie de Mode, in Cannes, France. Director, Bob Barrett, created a half-hour documentary about my underwater practice called "Snapshot: The Art of Photography," which has run multiple times on Art TV, TVO, and the Knowledge Network.

Tell us more about your latest series, Surfacing.

Against the enigmatic backdrop of the ocean, Surfacing captures shimmering figures, arising from the depths. At a glance, they may seem like magnificent sea creatures, but a closer look reveals women moving up towards the surface with fortitude and grace. Surfacing represents triumph, survival and self-sustainability. The women appear strong and timeless in a distinctly feminine way. They represent the power of one’s own personal will. In the era of #metoo, they are even more symbolic. These are women taking power back and leading the way. The metaphor echoes my own struggles as well as my personal and artistic accomplishments. I never know what a show means until it’s completed.

This was true with Surfacing, even though it was fueled by my personal history in so many ways. I left high school at a very deep, low point in my life. It felt like I was drowning.

Following my instincts for survival, over time, I found art and it lifted me up and I have used this experience to mentor other women. I have had many challenges to overcome but once the difficult times were worked through, I found myself becoming a focused and resonant storyteller. Surfacing deeply reflects my personal narrative.

What inspires you in your work?

There are endless things that inspire my work. I enjoy working with people (as opposed to shooting still-life's) because I need to capture an emotion. Capturing a person’s emotions, story and mannerisms is a true passion of mine. That being said, I will admit that my next show is still-life, which nearly came as a surprise once it was in development. It certainly presented itself to me. I’m inspired by creating peaceful, loving works since my world has experienced so much upheaval.

Beauty inspires me as do incredible locations; technical challenges and the experience of doing some good whether that is for other’s mental health or for the goodness of our planet. Even though sometimes it’s hard to recognize, I am confident in saying that we are all in this together. I’m inspired by the drive to convey that.

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CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT SURFACING

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Congratulations to George Byrne whose recent work "Post Truth" (pictured above) placed third in the Fine-Art category of the 2019 Minimalist Photography Awards.  

Of the work, the artist states:

"This image is from a recent series of mine called Post Truth. It is a photo-collage, constructed from elements pulled from multiple locations. Shot on medium format film. For the Post Truth series, I would look for ready-made vignettes of colour and form in the built world around me, and then try and repurpose or reinvent them. By embracing the process of photo-assemblage or collage, these photographs have become creations as much as they are observations.”

A selection of pieces by Geroge Byrne are available to view in person at Bau-Xi Vancouver and Bau-Xi Photo in Toronto.

Click to see all the winners of the 2019 Minimalist Photography Awards

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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?”

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VIEW MORE WORK BY ERIC LOUIE 

After an experience, you begin to rely on the memory of it. The passage of time is like the game ‘Telephone’, memories evolve and shift, imagination takes root supplying and omitting small details, until, over time our initial experience changes to become something entirely unexpected. So, our experiences and memories are ephemeral, constantly evolving. I find that concept incredibly interesting and very inspiring.

 In my practice, I have always played with combining imagination, experience, and memory. Photographs of my well-documented travels help to create a level of accuracy in depicting specific places. Yet, I choose to combine source images taken from singular or multiple references to create an imagined landscape. My compositions are never actually situated, rather they capture a feeling of a place or an amalgam of spaces.

I further add to this by adding in sketches or manipulating the compositions to enable the creation of paintings that evoke my initial experience of a place. The title ‘Forever is a Feeling’ encapsulates my current hopes and desires to hold onto precious moments. My paintings become the most permanent and lasting part of the experience and memory because they will never change.

2. Which artistic sources do you draw inspiration from and how has exposure to their work influenced your practice?

I am drawn to so many different artistic sources, I have always loved the soft edges, vast simplistic shapes and vibrating nature of Rothko’s work. I appreciate artists skilled at incorporating texture into their work in really sophisticated manners, with real depths of meaning, John Hartman, Donald Martiny, and Kim Dorland are a few I admire. 

Life and everyday experiences are the most prominent in my practice. Oftentimes I’ll take notice of how the sun strikes a tree or building in a certain way when out for a walk. I will be driving and find myself pulling over because our skies are creating a conversation between drama and softness that I must observe.

Fashion, cinema, and design are three areas that particularly excite me. They always provide me with new resources to draw upon and explore. They create puzzles for me to solve in terms of how to incorporate new ideas, materials, and techniques into my practice. It’s really exciting. I am always thinking about and cultivating new ideas. Some become immediately apparent in my work and others take years to digest before they start becoming part of my aesthetic.

3. Your process involves a wide array of techniques and media (washes, airbrush, spray paint and hand-cut stencils, to name a few). Which is the latest to make its way into your painting lexicon and what qualities in these materials draws you to them?

I have been really interested in dry brushing techniques within the stencils I create, adding, scrubbing, and removing layers of paint. As I am writing this I realize that this concept plays into the title of the show and the idea of permanence and how memories are subject to change. Aesthetically I am drawn to this because it is subtle it tones down the harsh edges of the stencils, it adds more depth to the layers and also a richness to the flat shapes I am highlighting.

4. Are any new application methods, formal elements or ongoing experimentations present in these paintings? What are you eager to explore next?

 Yes, I am always working on something new, revisiting past processes or techniques that I have not used in a while. Creating new techniques. Combining old ideas and new ideas. Changing them into something new and exciting. I am incredibly curious by nature and I am always asking what if? I love pushing paint into untraditional outcomes. Seeing how I can push materials capabilities to new limits. Isolating resin is a great example of some recent explorations of mine that I am testing out. My approach is quite scientific in this manner. My studio is my test kitchen. I often have lots of mini samples on the go. Playing with transparency, techniques, textures, additives, etc. It is lots of fun. My work may appear to be spontaneous but it's really not. I spend a lot of time perfecting the application of each layer. My work is quite layered, each piece having 5-10 layers of paint. There is a lot of curing time in-between layers. Which is why I usually have a few pieces on the go at any given time. So I allow the pieces to rest when they need to. The most intuitive and unplanned part of my process is the final textural components. This is the time where I finish my piece's colour relationships, highlight and subdue shapes, create a rhythm for the viewers and finalize the feeling I hope to capture.  Playing with new subjects, new colours, and new textures. This keeps the work exciting and fresh for others and myself.

5. What specific locations, lived experiences, or memories inform the constructed spaces of your work and how is it then mediated by imagination? How do source images, photo references, collages, and sketches factor into this conceptualization?

For this collection, I looked to a few different hiking experiences I have had over the years in the Canadian mountains. Two specific locations that come to mind are a helicopter hiking trip I did in the Bugaboos, a few favourite spots in Kananaskis, my experiences in both BC and Alberta mountain ranges and forests. Each experience is photographed. I then physically print out 1000’s of photos and go through them looking for connections. I cut up and tape together photos creating a collage and a starting off point for my work. Often, I will incorporate sketches from my memory of an experience or just my imagination and add them into the collage. After I create the collage I make large scale sketches to further refine the composition of the painting. While creating I am often flooded with memories from a particular hike. (When I encountered a grizzly bear with my 6 month old son, when we were stuck in a torrential downpour at Rawson lake sliding down the path, when happenstance took me to the most cinematic to perfect to be real windy road in San Francisco with the perfect amount of sunlight hitting the road and early morning fog still present on the trees behind)  I revisit feelings associated with them while creating the painting and my feelings and ideas about the places and experiences set the mood for my pieces. So everything all comes together within my constructed spaces, imagined places, ideas, memory, experiences collide.

6. How has your practice developed into the distinctive style and palette you work with today?

I have always been interested in interdisciplinary processes methods and techniques. Everything I am interested in from painting, sewing, design, sculpture, crafts, different styles, subjects, and their methodologies inform my work today.

Subjects, methods, and techniques I have been thinking about or had explored for a brief moment in the past may take years to manifest in my work. It’s an intuitive process and some things take years to emerge whilst others are more immediate.

In the past, my subjects were often photorealistic and only later did my work shift to photography, silk screening, glass blowing, bronze casting, and painting. I found myself more drawn to conceptualism and experiences rather than highly accurate depictions. With painting, I feel that all the combined components of my interdisciplinary experiences and found their way into one form. I really just love experimentation.

7. You had previously mentioned an interest in capturing the play of light in your compositions, what other formal considerations draw you to your subject matter?

Perspective, Colour, shapes, texture. I really love the small scale, often-overlooked elements, when painted in a large-scale format it can seem more monolithic than the mountain range. I love the quirky trees, and gnarly rocks, unexpected colours in the cracks and crevices of rocks. You really have to pay attention to find elements to paint that are unique and different. I am trying to create work that captures one's attention for more than a few moments. I think they are successful at capturing attention because of all the formal elements and layers. Each time you look at my paintings you can see something new. Hard edges, a soft edge, the suggestion of a form. All these formal elements are vital to create the context for the pieces.

8. What role do narrative frameworks play in your practice and in the viewing of the work?

In the end, a painting has to stand on its own merits, take the artists’ intentions and subtexts out and they have to work on their own aesthetically. That is why I love the ambiguity of my subjects. They are never really actual places, rather they are suggestions of places. They are neither abstract nor realistic. Not all the information is given and so the viewer is asked to fill in the gaps, to lend their own interpretation and experiences to the pieces, allowing the works to take on new and richer depths of meaning.

For a limited time, Bau-Xi Gallery is offering FREE CRATING AND SHIPPING on artworks $5000 and over, purchased online. Offer ends September 1st, 2019. 

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Free crating and shipping is eligible for online purchases only, valued at $5000 and over. Select pick-up in store at time of purchase and the item will be shipped courtesy of the gallery to your location. The promotion runs until September 1, 2019. Promotion does not apply to rush or over night orders: a standard crating and shipping timeline of 10 – 15 days is applicable. Free crating and shipping is not valid in combination with other promotions or offers.

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Read Virginia Mak's thoughts on her most recent body of work, Composed, which will be featured in Bau-Xi Vancouver's upcoming group Exhibition, "Her" opening on Saturday, August 10.

"In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, the character Marianne is described as “eager in everything; her sorrows and joys could have no moderation.” To me, she personifies “sensibility.”

As humans, we derive meaning and pleasure from making something. This series, titled Composed, consists of photographic portraits that imply a certain artistic sensibility. I wanted to visually depict the undeterred spirit of originality. For that, I used a film camera and a paintbrush.

I photographed writers, editors, actors, painters, visual artists and other individuals. I then painted on rice paper lines and shapes that serve as subtle hints about the subject or their work. Working in the darkroom with film negatives, I placed the painted rice paper over the photographic paper during the enlarging process.

There is both tension and harmony in choosing to use this layering process. It obscures a portion of the image while adding other elements to it. The painted lines and motifs reveal my reflections about the “creators.”  For example, in an image of a caregiver who finds time to embroider, my drawing referenced water and gardens in order to evoke her dreaming of her home faraway. Likewise, in an image of an artist who delves into ice formations in her work, I included translucent ice-like elements in my composition.

My intention was to compose collages that blend content with colours and shapes. The content may be true, fictive, mysterious or playful. The resulting photographs shift from straight portraits to more poetic pictures." 

Virginia Mak was born in Hong Kong. After graduating with a Philosophy Degree from the University of Calgary, she went on to study Photography at the Ontario College of Art. Mak has exhibited her work internationally. She is a recipient of project, exhibition and travel grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work has been written about in the Calgary Herald, the Toronto Star, the Vancouver Sun and the Globe and Mail; and featured in magazines such as Prefix and PhotoLife. Mak's photographs can be found in the Canada Council Art Bank and the Toronto Archives, among other public and private collections throughout North America and Hong Kong.

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Eric Louie's latest exhibition, 'Awakening' has been covered by digital press outlets BOOOOOOOM, Designboom and Blouin Art Info.

The artist’s distinct future-forward aesthetic and formalist sensibility informs the richly layered virtual worlds of his paintings—rife with colourful shapes, shaded with brightly-hued gradients and accented with chrome-like effects.

Louie's exhibition runs until April 20, at Bau-Xi Vancouver (3045 Granville Street)

Click to read BOOOOOOOM article

Click to read designboom article

Click to read Blouinartinfo article

View more work by Eric Louie online

SURFACING, the latest series by Toronto-based artist Barbara Cole, represents triumph, survival and self-actualization. Set against a vast and tumultuous ocean-scape, this series depicts shimmering figures rising triumphantly towards the surface. This series is fueled by Cole's personal history, and the ethereal figures shown are a celebration of power of will and strength to overcome.

Cole expertly captures the beauty and dynamism of the human form moving through water, a reference to overcoming the obstacles which bring us ultimately toward resilience, and a place of true empowerment. SURFACING is the embodiment of what it means to rise and conquer. 

While this series has a personal undertone for Cole, the female subjects are not purely self-referential; they also refer to the many women who prevail through the daily turmoil of assault, depression, other mental health issues, as well as the stigma that often accompany them.

With this series, Cole aims not only to open a dialogue on mental health but also to let those suffering in silence know that there are effective resources available to them. Cole has partnered with organizations Bell Let’s Talk and the Campaign to Change Direction in an effort to further their initiatives in spreading awareness and destigmatizing mental health issues, and to advocate for important and useful links and resources. 

These pictorial metaphors echo my own struggles as well as the realization of my personal and artistic aspirations. These are women who are taking back power and leading the way.

SURFACING will be on view at 350 Dundas St W from September 12-28, 2019. Join us to celebrate the opening on Thursday, September 12th from 5-7pm, and hear Barbara Cole in conversation with renowned journalist Anna Maria Tremonti at 6pm as they discuss the importance of mental well-being. 

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ADAPTATION

SURFACING

SUMMIT

ESSENCE

ALLIANCE

DISGUISE

PRESENCE