Cora Cummins and Saoirse Higgins at The LexIcon Gallery

 A couple of weeks ago I realised that I was running out of time to see an exhibition that had been on my radar for a few months! With the way these past two years have gone, at least I can forgive myself for losing track of time. But at least I got to see the exhibition at The LexIcon Gallery prior to its close. On Steady Ground/Unsteady Ground was a 2-person exhibition by Cora Cummins and Saoirse Higgins. While there was some collaboration in process discovery and prior to exhibiting work (as indicated in an artist talk by Cummins) the exhibition itself is not of collaborative work, rather work by two very individual artists.

Entering the gallery from the adjacent library, the viewer is brought face to face with a number of prints by Cora Cummins and the variation in scale - from tiny mezzotints to the multi-panel etching - is immediately apparent.

The common denominator between the works by the two artists seemed to be landscape and a concern for the environment. However, this is only a surface reading of the works as both artists are really addressing issues of isolation and responses to the pandemic seem to seep out of the works.

As I knew something of Cora Cummins prior to listening to her artist talk (via Zoom the week before I saw the exhibition) I was not surprised to find out that Cummins was also finding creativity from insurmountable grief (her husband died, far too young, several years ago). 

Even had I not known this, I would have looked at the fractured image in the multi-panelled print Monument as something more meaningful than simply the image of a mountain. Because of the artist talk I was aware that this labour-intensive piece subverted the whole point of printmaking itself - it was a unique piece and would always remain so:

Cummins, after printing those unique panels, used the copper plates to form the sculpture Fallen. Together the two works complement each other in a heartbreaking expression of sorrow and survival.

The space around each work allowed that necessary room to hold the emotionsal impact.

I thought, at first, that this wall hanging was another of Cummins's works, but the creator was Saoirse Higgins. It was a good bridging piece between her and Cummins's pieces. The central image had that feeling of landscape but its actuality could not be placed. Perhaps it was a detail? Within the larger cloth it took on several aspects of appearance and connotation: a shroud, a blanket and a screen. So any emotional reading was confused by a multiplicity of meaning.

And then one is drawn to the flickering video in the small room at the back of the gallery where the changing shoreline and racing clouds of timelapse are mesmerising. I was unable to attend Higgins's artist talk but from hints Cummins gave in her talk, I surmised that the landscape filme was of a remote island in the Orkneys where Higgins spent much time in isolation during the worst days of the pandemic.

At some point the video/film becomes multi-split-screen and, aside from the saturated blues of sea and sky, one is aware of the propellor movement from a small aircraft. Both Higgins's and Cummins's work deal with the passage of time and leave the viewer with a melancholic hope. I was glad I had the chance to view the work in this incarnation, at this venue.

 

Anonymous Archive part 1 of 2

 A few weeks ago I was the recipient of a hit and run dump: the doorbell rang and no one was there but a large, filthy cardboard folder full of really old pieces of artwork had been left at the door. About a third of it was mine, and I knew an estranged sibling was doing a deep clean of their attic.

So, from the "anonymous archive" this is a very early - from grade 11 in high school, 1977 - oil pastel. I actually remember doing it; I was working from a rectangular landscape picture and decided to draw it in a circle, making everything curvy.

I think I must have liked using oil pastels (now I prefer materials more extreme - either chalk pastels or oilsticks - which are on opposite sides of the spectrum). I think this oil pastel still life is from grade 12, late 1977 or early 1978.

When I was in grade 12 I received a scholarship to the Art Gallery of Ontario's Gallery School, which meant I had unlimited access to the gallery, and art classes on Saturday mornings. I was totally thrilled with the arrangement. The artist/teachers divided the classes into rotating groups to do life drawing, plaster mould-making (around clay sculpture) and printmaking. The printmaking module consisted of an introduction to lithography using paper plates rather than stone. I don't know what inspired this preparation sketch, perhaps my ideal landscape?

I was really surprised to see this print again, I had completely forgotten about it - I remembered learning about the principles of lithography and I remembered using a paper plate rather than stone, but I did not remember the image at all. Printmaking was my last module at the Gallery School, so it would have been created during the spring of 1978.

I started art school in September 1978 at Central Technical School's 3-Year Special Adult Art Programme, which was a free post-secondary art programme run out of a high school (though in a separate art building) by the Toronto Board of Education. The programme had a long history as it was founded to train returning veterans of WW1 into commercial art. The programme had a very good reputation for training would-be artists in both commercial and fine art as well as craft, with extensive facilities for sculpture, illustration, ceramics, photography, printmaking, life drawing, etc. In my first year I loved having both life drawing and life painting classes (3 hours each weekly). I still remember this model, Fred, was always very stately when clothed, and totally professional when not. This drawing and watercolour would have been done in early 1978 as we didn't actually "paint" in life painting during the first part of the school year.

Lucian Freud Project at IMMA

I went to the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) recently to see the Lucian Freud work, which will be exhibited in the Garden Galleries for the next five years. While at the moment all the work is being exhibited as a large collection, I got the impression that over this period that the work may be exhibited in different curatorial permutations, so now was the time to see the work before there was any personal "agenda" attached to it! This etching is Self Portrait: Reflection, 1996. 

I have to admit that I was never particularly interested in Freud's (what seemed to me) hyper realistic painting before, but there is something compelling about seeing a collection of works together. And that I have long been interested in psychoanalysis. And that there is an unmistakable psychological element in his work that definitely is reflective of the work of his grandfather. So the name becomes part of the intrigue, and part of my reason for going to the exhibition. This etching is Bella in Her Pluto T Shirt, 1995.

The basement gallery was devoted to works on paper, mostly etchings. Given my relatively recent interest in printmaking, I was delighted to find the room full of work that was unfamiliar to me. This etching is Girl with Fuzzy Hair, 2004. I thought this print was especially interesting as I thought at first the white highlights in the hair were were created manually when wiping off the plate before going to the press. However, there was another print with similarities and the display included the metal etching plate; the highlighted areas were actually burnished on the plate itself! These burnished highlights in curly hair are a major feat of burnishing brilliance!

There were quite a lot of etching portraits in this exhibition, which had incredible detail and certainly did not speak of flattery; as I said above, something about psychology and the artist's name... This etching is The New Yorker, 2006.

Although most of the basement gallery exhibition displayed images of people, there were several landscapes, which also indicate Freud's meticulous translation of observation. This gorgeously detailed etching is Painter's Garden, 2003-2004.