Work of the Week

This week’s Work of the Week is Sunset on Boot Hill by Delia Cross Child.

Cross Child’s acrylics, such as Sunset on Boot Hill, are stunning evocations of colour that might be mistaken as psychedelic by anyone who had never witnessed the rolling prairies of southern Alberta. Her landscape scintillates with reds, ambers, and blues that rise like smoke into a sky aflame.
 

About the Artist: Delia Cross Child

Delia Cross Child is a Blood and Peigan artist and teacher who fuses historical and contemporary art traditions of Turtle Island and Europe to inspire her communities and educate the public about First Nations issues.

Born in Pincher Creek and raised in an one-child family on the Peigan Reserve at Brocket, Cross Child was fascinated by the landscape and its changing seasons, whose mountain-view hills and Old Man River valley she explored with her parents and siblings. The experiences became foundational to her later paintings; she describes “a performance… of ever-changing colour, sight, and sound” that was “only a part of the territory that… the Blackfoot Confederacy… had occupied for a long time. [It was] a place of solace during the times when my world appeared to be chaotic and confusing,” a world whose legacy included the mass-trauma of forced assimilation, residential schools, and “hunger, sadness, and abuse.”

Cross Child later attended the University of Lethbridge where she earned her B.A. in Art and Native American Studies (1996) and her B.Ed. in Art (2002). To motivate her students at Kainai High School on the Blood Reserve near Standoff, Alberta, she integrated traditional visual literacy into her teaching

Cross Child’s work has been exhibited at the Glenbow Museum, Walter Phillips Gallery, and Southern Alberta Art Gallery, and lives in the public collections of the University of Lethbridge, the Blood Tribe Administration, and the Glenbow Museum. Cross Child has received several academic and art awards, including membership in the University of Lethbridge’s Alumni Honour Society (2009), the Blackfoot Fine Arts Award (2008), and the Gerald Tailfeathers Art Scholarship (1996).

This week’s Work of the Week is Mind Over Matter by renowned Indigenous artist Alex Janvier.

This past Wednesday, September 30, was Orange Shirt Day – a day to honour residential school survivors and victims. In Alberta, there are about 12,000 residential school survivors and their families, including Alex Janvier.

About the Artist: Alex Janvier

Alex Janvier was born on the Le Goff Reserve, Cold Lake First Nations, Alberta, in 1935. He was raised in the Chipewyan tradition until he attended the Blue Quill Residential Indian School at the age of eight.

Janvier graduated with Honours from the Alberta College of Art in 1960 and since then has built an international reputation as a painter, muralist and printmaker. He has influenced a younger generation of native artists through his paintings and advocacy work with arts organizations and land claim committees.
 

His imagery is a combination of traditional native decorative motifs such as medicine wheels, floral designs and symbolic colour combinations. In the late 1980's and early 1990's, his work became more representational and concerned with specific social and political issues.

Janvier has been the recipient of many accolades throughout his career. Since 2007, he has received honourary doctorates from both the University of Calgary and the University of Alberta, was appointed to the Order of Canada, received a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts and was the first ever recipient of the Marion Nicoll Visual Arts Award from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

Alex Janvier continues to live and work in Cold Lake.

This week’s Work of the Week is Viking II by Douglas Motter.

When someone says the word ‘Viking’ do you think of a burly, blonde man wearing a horned helmet who plunders villages? If so, you may want to think again!  A new study suggests that Vikings didn’t exactly fit these modern stereotypes. Read more about it here. 
 

About the Artist: Douglas Motter (1913-1993)

Douglas Motter was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1913. He moved to Calgary, Alberta with his family in 1919. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interior Design from the University of Missouri in 1935.

Motter was an educator, a watercolour painter, a printmaker, and a weaver. He was introduced to hand weaving in 1945, when he bought a loom for his wife. What started out as a hobby ended up turning into a career, as he was weaving professionally by the 1960s. Motter opened his own weaving studio called Doug Motter & Associates in 1961. His company specialized in creating decorative pieces, and one-of-a-kind fabrics. His studio also provided novice weavers with a place to test out their weaving skills.

In 1958, Motter was selected to exhibit at the Brussels World Fair. He was also chosen to exhibit at the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal, Quebec (or Expo 67, as it commonly referred to).

Motter started teaching classes part-time at the Alberta College of Art in 1962, and by 1968 he was a full-time instructor at the College specializing in weaving, drawing, and design. He made a significant contribution to establishing the visual arts scene in Calgary, as he was one of the founders of the Allied Arts Centre. Motter also served as the President of the Alberta Society of Artists for two terms, and held the position of Provincial Director for Alberta at the Canadian Crafts Council.

His watercolour paintings reside in private and public collections in North America.

This week’s Work of the Week is October Snow, Foothills Morning by David More.

Well, it’s mid-October and that means it’s time for snow! Many parts of Alberta will be getting their first snowfall of the year today.

About the Artist: David More

David More is a painter, illustrator, author, and muralist.
 

Born in Scotland, he moved with his family to Canada in 1948, eventually settling in Red Deer, Alberta. Growing up in a community surrounded by forests and parks had a profound effect on shaping his art practice, especially what he calls his direct landscape paintings. He makes beauty out of the ordinary, whether depicting wild or manicured spaces, and explores in paint the range of moods in places often known only to locals.

More uses his art to explore subtle changes in the landscape, including the ebb and flow of the Medicine River through the seasons, the various cloud formations over the sky in the prairies, and the slow but destructive effects of acid rain in New Brunswick. More began his Garden Ceremony series in 1975, and he has returned to this series continually over the years. Inspired by his travels throughout Canada and to countries including Brazil, France, England, Trinidad and India, these large-scale garden paintings explore the juxtapositions between man-made and organic forms.

He graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design (now the Alberta University of the Arts) in 1972. In his early career, he worked as an art history researcher, a medical graphics artist, and taught at the Alberta College of Art and Design for three years. He came back to Red Deer and was a part-time instructor in the faculty of visual arts at Red Deer College for over 30 years, until his retirement in 2014.

In 2019, More donated about 200 sketches, drawings, and paintings to the Red Deer Museum & Art Gallery, as a way to give back to the community where he has spent most of his life painting the fields, streams, and skies.

This week’s Work of the Week is Revenant Portrait No. 5 Locked Doors by Calgary artist Karrie Arthurs.

About the Artist: Karrie Arthurs

Karrie Arthurs is a Calgary-based artist who works with paper and ink. A long-time tattoo artist, Karrie says her two artistic practices influence one another—almost melding together.
 

For several years, she has sourced and collected a large amount of “antique” paper, envelopes, documents, portraits etc., some dating 150 years old or more. This is the material she incorporates into her art - drawing on it with ink, charcoal and chalk primarily.

You can learn more about Karrie Arthurs and her artistic practice in her Alberta Artist Profile on our website.

This week’s Work of the Week is Perception 3 by Robert Dmytruk.
 

About the Artist: Robert Dmytruk

After earning his B.Ed. in Secondary Art Instruction (1980) at the University of Alberta, Robert Dmytruk undertook three decades of teaching Alberta teens the values and techniques of painting, drawing, and mixed media. Using those same modes for his own artistic practice, Dmytruk began painting plein air landscapes, but then began obliquely depicting environmental themes in his exploration of rural and urban landscapes. At the same time, he was developing his own style with influences arising from artists such as Cy Twombly, Paul Klee, and Joan Miro. In Robert Dmytruk – Transitions (Rich Fog Micro Publishing, 2013), Julie Oakes remarks that Dmytruk “speaks volumes with his lines, textures, patches of colour and undulating toned-downed atmospheres. His paintings are in fact playful, lilting, and without a didactic hidden agenda, accepting the great opposites of our modern dilemma.”

Dmytruk has mounted numerous solo exhibitions, including at Edmonton’s The Works Festival, St. Albert’s Profiles Gallery, and Stony Plain’s Offenhauser Art Museum. The Alberta Foundation for the Arts Collection, the Strathcona Permanent Art Collection, and private collectors own selections of his work.

In addition to receiving the Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence in the Fine Arts, Dmytruk also won the Award for Teaching Visual Arts from the Emily Carr School of Art and Design—both in 2006.

After teaching and serving as an administrator in art schools, universities, and conferences in Canada and the U.S., Dmytruck retired to Summerland, British Columbia to create art full-time in his private studio.

This week’s Work of the Week is The Accident by Rita McKeough.

This artwork was part of the recent Travelling Exhibition Program (TREX) exhibition Mittenism and the Quest for Empathy. You can see all the artworks in this exhibition at alberta.emuseum.com/exhibitions/560/mittenism-and-the-quest-for-empathy.

This exhibition features etchings and lithography prints by renowned interdisciplinary artist Rita McKeough. Over the last 30 years, McKeough has been a major contributor to Canada’s strong reputation in audio, media installation and performance based visual art. Early on in her career, McKeough translated her ideas through etching and lithography techniques, creating several series of works that use inanimate objects to explore the complex emotion of empathy. Is this ball ok?, The Canadian Cookie Association and Manifesto of Mittenism initially appear childlike but through time reveal a conceptually complex narrative balanced with a quirky and sometimes dark absurdity.
 

The exhibition Mittenism and the Quest for Empathy was curated by Xanthe Isbister and organized by the Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre.

About the Artist: Rita McKeough

Rita McKeough was born in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, studied printmaking and sculpture at the University of Calgary and received her BFA in 1975. She returned to the East Coast to attend the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax and was awarded her MFA in 1979. Throughout her career she has instructed at numerous universities and art colleges across Canada, including NASCAD, the University of Calgary, the University of Manitoba and the Banff Centre, and since 2007 she has instructed full time at the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD). She has become an influential role model and mentor who inspires colleagues and encourages younger artists.

Want to see more artworks by McKeough? On now, until December 12, is the exhibition Rita McKeough | darkness is as deep as the darkness is at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre.

In honour of Métis Week (November 15-21), this week’s Work of the Week is Making Faces by Métis artist Heather Shillinglaw.
 

About the Artist: Heather Shillinglaw

Heather Shillinglaw graduated in 1996 from the Alberta College of Art and Design (now the Alberta University of the Arts).

Her mixed-media work explores the bridging of cultures as she has experienced it as a Métis woman and as a traveler to other territories and countries. She is intrigued by the "similarities and differences" between cultures, something that her own heritage allows her to access more readily. In 1993, Heather partnered with National Film Board and Women of the Métis Nation using a film Daughter of the Country Series to create new works.

She is represented in numerous public, private and corporate collections and is an active member of several Métis organizations including Women of the Métis Nation. She has exhibited extensively around Alberta over the past ten years.

This week's Work of the Week is Dark Horse by Calgary-based artist Yvonne Mullock. 
 

This artwork came into the AFA's collection in 2018 through the Art Acquisition by Application program. 
 

You can see this artwork in person at the Jarvis Hall Gallery where its currently on view until January 16, 2021 in the exhibition up front w/ Yvonne Mullock.

According the Jarvis Hall Gallery website: 

DARK HORSE is a multifaceted body of work that uses iconic symbols synonymous with cowboy culture – the stetson hat and horse as tropes to explore Calgary’s long and entwined history of ranching and the city’s historic annual Stampede event. Using print, video and sculpture DARK HORSE explores an innovative horse-centric printmaking method and invites viewers to delve into cowboy identity and Western mythologies that hover over the history, collective memory and folklore traditions in Calgary.

The Jarvis Hall Galley is located at 333B 36th Avenue SE in Calgary and is open by appointment only. Details online at: jarvishallgallery.com.

About the Artist: Yvonne Mullock

Yvonne Mullock is a graduate from Glasgow School of Art and is currently based in Calgary, Canada.

Her multidisciplinary art practice explores materiality and the processes embodied in the act of making. Incorporating collage, sculpture, ceramics, video and textiles, her work explores ideas of authorship, craft and labour for both gallery and site-specific installations.

This week's Work of the Week is Piano Lesson by Vivian Herman. 

One of the more famous compositions for the piano is Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, better known as Moonlight Sonata, by Ludwig van Beethoven. It was composed in 1801.
 

Beethoven is one of the world's most celebrated classical composers, and 2020 marks his 250th birthday! He was born in December 1770, but the exact date is not known. However, he was batized on December 17, 1770, and the custom of the time was to have infants baptized within 24-hours of their birth.