Art
Water, land, air, light: The art of Janet Read – BradfordToday
Janet Read has always had a special relationship with water.
Growing up in Shanty Bay on the north shore of Kempenfelt Bay, “I learned to swim at the government dock,” she says, at the age of only three.
And while other kids swam and played in the water, for Read the connection was more visual, and transformative.
“Throw the water up in the air – you’d have diamonds!” she says.
As an artist, Read has continued to be fascinated by the interplay of water, air and light, finding metaphor in the blurring of the boundaries between the elements.
As she works at her art studio, now located on the south shore of Kempenfelt Bay in Innisfil, she is still fascinated by that interplay.
“Water is so changeable, and the atmosphere is changeable,” she says. “It’s always changing…”
One art show curator has called Read’s paintings “allusions of landscape” – abstract expressions of the littoral zone where water meets land, the meeting place between atmosphere and ocean. They can be interpreted as landscapes, but they are not a specific location or site – they are distillations of impressions that evoke wind, clouds, seascapes, fog and ice.
She is inspired by the places she visits, but “I don’t paint by sight. It’s all by memory,” she explains. “I work from my interior imagination…. I start with patches of colour, and then I take it from there.
“It’s a process, figuring out what’s happening.”
When Read has painted a recognizable scene, it’s been largely by accident.
She recently completed a large 30 x 60 canvas, before realizing it looked familiar. “I was totally unconscious,” she says. “When I finished it, I said – it’s a real place!” It was in fact Quliakitsoqu in the Arctic, looking towards Uummannaq, Greenland, a location she visited while on a trip to the high Arctic in 2018.
Read has found inspiration wherever she has lived or travelled – in Port Hope, while in residency at Pouch Cove in Newfoundland, and on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland, and especially her voyage to the Arctic.
There, the experience resulted in a change in her colour palette – shifting towards azure blues and icy aquas, with just a touch of reds and purples, hinting at the wildflowers of the arctic tundra or lights hidden in the ice.
“It’s just the most amazing landscape. It feels like the atmosphere is clearer, higher, more domed,” she says. All of her Arctic works have a sense of space and light that combine to create a transcendental experience for the viewer.
The canvases are large, giving Read the “elbow room” to get physical as she builds the planes, blocks and layers of colour.
“The physicality of a large painting really suits what I am doing,” she says. “What I’m interested in is the water and the atmosphere above the water,” and especially the meeting of air, land and sea.
“It is in our western thinking that things are discreet. The littoral area is where things are interpenetrating, where things interact,” she explains. “I’m not fond of hard distinctions. Everything is interconnected.”
Read describes her recent works as among her most abstract, suggesting that some of her earlier paintings are more obviously landscapes, more “figural.”
Light Opens over Water, a series of drawings in oil and graphite on Duralar, a translucent film, are abstract and luminous but recognizable as landscapes; her Newfoundland collection, Ocean as Vessel, explores not only the relationship between land and sea but also the impact of the loss of the cod fishery, placing the paintings in a cultural context.
There is never any overt symbolism; there is instead an interpretation of imagery and use of colour to express Read’s internal vision.
Curator Christian Bernhard Singer has called her works “landscapes of consciousness,” engaging and challenging the viewer to appreciate the beauty in what can be an immersive experience, suspended between sea, sky and atmosphere.
“It’s that moment,” Read says. “As human beings, light is a metaphor for all human states… We don’t look at one thing. We look at everything in relation to everything.”
Read hopes to be able to return to the Arctic in the fall of 2022. If she does, she won’t be cataloguing the impact of climate change. Instead, she will focus on experiencing a changing world, absorbing not only the viewpoints of the scientists who accompany the voyage, but also the interpretations of the Indigenous people for whom the landscape is home.
“I react as an artist,” she says. “I’m not interested in depicting what I see. I’m interested in what I feel” – and in sharing that emotional vision, through her vibrant works.
If the trip doesn’t take place, she isn’t worried: she has enough memories and imagery stored up to keep painting.
“How does the imagination keep turning that over, and mining that lode? Somehow it does!” she says. Her residency in Newfoundland, for example, “was one of those seminal experiences,” Read says. “It was several years of being propelled by that experience.”
Read’s works have been shown at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Varley Gallery, Art Gallery of Northumberland, and Orillia Museum of Art and History, where she has been part of the Carmichael Landscape Exhibition. She has also participated in the annual Innisfil Studio Tour, and currently shows at the Rebecca Gallery in Toronto, and the Propeller Artist Centre collective on Queen Street West.
Her Arctic paintings – which include titles like Vernacular of Light; and the wind speaks; and Tundra Light – were part of a solo show, ‘High Arctic Light’ at the Heliconian Club in Toronto, an organization that supports women in the arts and literature. The solo exhibit will be returning to the Heliconian for in-person viewing in May 2022.
Her works can also be viewed online; click here.
Art
PARIS RESTAURANT PLÉNITUDE IS REVEALED AS THE RECIPIENT OF THE ART OF HOSPITALITY AWARD 2024 … – Yahoo Canada Finance
Announced in advance of the awards ceremony for the first time ever, this accolade seeks to help raise the profile of the art of hospitality
LONDON, April 18, 2024 /CNW/ — Paris restaurant Plénitude is revealed as the recipient of the Art of Hospitality Award 2024 from The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, ahead of the official ceremony taking place in Las Vegas in June.
Located on the first floor of the French capital’s Cheval Blanc Paris, Chef Arnaud Donckele and Director Alexandre Larvoir have created in Plénitude an ode to the tradition of French fine dining, spending two years choosing the crockery, artisans, ceramicist and fabrics that help to create the restaurant’s intimate ambiance. With just 30 covers, every detail delivers an intimate experience for its diners, complete with the restaurant’s signature French elegance.
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Normandy-born Chef Donckele, who also runs Cheval Blanc Saint-Tropez fine dining restaurant La Vague d’Or, has taken on the role of master perfumer in his creations to make sauces, known as the essence of French cuisine. In his hands, each is treated like a perfume or liquid painting, created such that the sauces are the main event, with meat and fish as their complements. Under the leadership of Larvoir, the restaurant’s impeccable service team knows Donckele’s creations intimately and conveys their essence to guests stepping through the door of Cheval Blanc Paris, which was placed at No.34 on The World’s 50 Best Hotels 2023.
William Drew, Director of Content for The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, says: “We are thrilled to announce Plénitude as the winner of this year’s Art of Hospitality Award. Despite its relative youth, this Paris restaurant has been making waves on the global gastronomy scene for its flawless and inventive approach, celebrating the art of service and showing the world that French hospitality remains at the top of its game.”
Chef Donckele says: “Give yourself the pleasure of giving pleasure.” Larvoir adds: “At Plénitude, service is a wonderful encounter at every table. We seek to welcome our guests as if they were at home, to discover and understand them, to captivate and move them thanks to Arnaud’s fabulous sauces, to make them laugh too, before leaving them with the sincere wish to see them again soon.”
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Art
Canada's art installation at Venice Biennale rooted in research, history, beauty – Hamilton Spectator
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Hundreds of thousands of tiny glass beads will soon be twinkling in the sun across the entire Canadian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Canada’s newly revealed entry in one of the world’s most prestigious art fairs.
But Kapwani Kiwanga, the Hamilton-born, Paris-based creator of the work, wants you to get past the cobalt blue glass glinting in the Venetian light. She wants you to think of each bead as a character.
The Venice Biennale, which runs this year from April 20 to November 24, is one of the world’s most prestigious international art shows. It is also held alongside the Documenta in the German city of Kassel.
The lagoon city will once again become the center of the international art world in the coming weeks and months. Over 800,000 art lovers made a pilgrimage to the previous Biennale held two years ago, and two-thirds came from abroad, a new record.
Israeli pavilion to remain closed in protest
The Israel-Hamas war is having a direct impact on the prestigious art show.
A collective of pro-Palestinian activists, the “Art Not Genocide Alliance” or ANGA for short, had been calling for the exclusion of Israel from this year’s Biennale amid the conflict.
In an open letter, the activists criticized Israel for its military action in the Gaza Strip — which the collective calls a “genocide” against the Palestinians.
The open letter condemns the “double standards” of Biennale organizers, noting that they remained silent on the situation in the Middle East while they had condemned Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine two years earlier. According to the alliance, more than 23,750 people have signed the call so far, including US photographer Nan Goldin.
The Biennale rejected the calls for a boycott. The curators had already decided on the concept and participants of the central Biennale exhibition long before the Hamas terror attack on October 7 that prompted Israel’s retaliation in the Gaza Strip.
But now the doors to the Israeli pavilion will stay closed anyway. The exhibition’s featured artist, Ruth Patir, an Israeli born in New York in 1984, announced in a statement on Tuesday that the show will only open “when a cease-fire and hostage release agreement is reached.”
“The decision by the artist and curators is not to cancel themselves nor the exhibition; rather, they choose to take a stance in solidarity with the families of the hostages and the large community in Israel who is calling for change,” the statement on Patir’s website adds.
Patir’s exhibition, “M/otherLand,” features a video installation of ancient museum figurines representing “broken women” who “come to life and take part in a procession, in a shared public expression of grief, sorrow, and rage. The camera’s point of view is that of a bystander or a witness to the scene, thereby claiming a subjective, embodied take on world events.”
Israel has had its own national pavilion in Venice since 1950.
Russia’s pavilion to remain empty again
Meanwhile, the Russian pavilion will once again remain empty.
The Biennale did not officially exclude Russia, but after the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the artists and curators selected for the Russian pavilion resigned from participating under the national banner.
Ukraine is participating through a group exhibition titled “Net Making.”
‘Foreigners Everywhere’
Titled “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere,” the main exhibition is curated by the Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, who becomes the Venice Art Biennale’s first artistic director born and based in the Global South. The artistic director aims to show art from the Global South’s less privileged and less industrialized regions.
Pedrosa’s “primary focus is thus artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled or refugees,” he said in a statement. The exhibition extends across the Giardini park, the historic shipyard halls known as Arsenale and other art locations in the lagoon city.
The slogan itself is inspired by a work by a Parisian artist collective called Claire Fontaine, who had created different versions of the neon sign in 53 different languages. They now light up the Arsenale.
The international art show features 330 artists, with 88 countries presenting their own exhibitions. Most of them are showing their works in the Arsenale, without their own exhibition hall.
This year, four countries will participate for the first time at the Venice event: Benin, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Timor Leste. Nicaragua, Panama and Senegal will also participate with their own national pavilions for the first time.
African voices at the Art Biennale
The African continent, in particular, has been strengthening its presence at the world’s oldest art show. Ghana and Madagascar participated for the first time in 2019; Uganda, Cameroon and Namibia followed in 2022.
Based on the theme “Everything Precious is Fragile,” Benin’s pavilion features the works of artists Chloe Quenum, Moufouli Bello, Ishola Akpo and Romuald Hazoume. It is organized by Nigerian curator and critic Azu Nwagbogu, who is also the founder and director of the Lagos Photo Festival and the African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting contemporary African art worldwide.
Among the foundation’s success stories is Romuald Hazoume. The now 62-year-old Yoruba artist and sculptor had already gained acclaim through his participation at Documenta 12 in Kassel in 2007, where he presented an impressive installation commenting on flight, expulsion and the loss of home.
Through Benin’s pavilion, curator Nwagbogu also wants to spark a new perspective on the decolonization of art, he told journalists ahead of the exhibition. Beyond the restitution of objects, he also wants to promote the “restitution of knowledge.” With the help of a “library of resistance,” he aims to give voice to women on topics such as African identity, ecology and science.
Does he feel that African voices are sufficiently represented in Venice? “I would like to see many more,” Nwagbogu told DW. “More importantly, I would like to see more deep cultural infrastructure built and supported on the [European] continent and more support for those impressive events we have already built across Africa.”
Germany’s multicultural approach
Among the 28 permanent country pavilions in the Giardini Park, the German pavilion’s program opens with a presentation by Berlin theater director Ersan Mondtag and Israeli artist Yael Bartana.
Under the title “Thresholds,” they offer an exploration of the past and the future inspired by various artistic concepts. The curator this year, after Yilmaz Dziewior in 2022, is the Istanbul-born architect and co-director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Cagla Ilk. Referring to the title of the show, she explained that on the threshold, “Nothing is certain.”
The pope expected at the event
The Vatican offers one of the attention-grabbing shows this year: It is placing its pavilion in the women’s prison in Venice. Inmates accompany visitors on an art itinerary through the prison.
Pope Francis also wants to visit the pavilion. He would be the first pontiff to date to visit the Venice Biennale.
This article was originally written in German.
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