OBSESSIVENESS AND EXCITEMENT, NEVER GROWING OUT OF THEM, OIL AND ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 40 X 60 INCHES

Wei Li’s painting speaks for itself. Her brush strokes tangle and twist in flashes of brilliant colour, in sumptuous variations of texture. It seems almost to evolve as you look at it, as if it might rearrange itself the moment you glance away. The startling immediacy of Li’s craft makes it no surprise to find her work, Obsessiveness and excitement, never growing out of them, among the 15 finalists in this year’s RBC Canadian Painting Competition.

Li, who emigrated from China in 2010 and now calls Edmonton home, characterizes her art as being about emotion and memory, and the subjective experience. “I try to bring the very complicated hybrid experience into my painting so it becomes very complex,” she says. “Something a little bit hard to recognize but you can sense it, you can feel it.” Her style is also remarkable for its use of “painterly gestures,” an intuitive method of painting that requires the artist to rely on instinct and experience. “I make decisions based on the moment when I’m painting,” Li explains. “I believe all the energy I put into the process will somehow find a way to stay on the canvas.” If Li’s work so far is any indication, that energy will not only stay on the canvas, it will also leap off to greet us.

The RBC Canadian Painting Competition, established in 1999, is an award intended to bridge the gap between emerging and established artists. The winner will be announced October 17.

Apartment, acrylic panel, 2016. Courtesy Heather Cline.

Regina, Sask., artist Heather Cline has her own ideas about Canada’s sesquicentennial. There’s nothing wrong with a big national blowout, she says, but Ottawa’s version of an official birthday party isn’t for her. “In Canada, we talk a lot about big history moments, but I’ve always thought about how everyday people and everyday places have real meaning and importance.” For Cline, small towns are the soul of the nation. The result of her conviction is her solo exhibition Quiet Stories from Canadian Places, a series of acrylic landscapes inspired by small town Canadiana. “I’m offering it up as a dialogue with official history,” says Cline. “I call it community history.”

A well-known mixed media artist and winner of the Saskatchewan Lieutenant Governor’s Art Award in 2014, Cline started toying with the interplay between personal history and place in 2007. What ties people to their community? And how could those stories be turned into paintings? “I started thinking about Canada’s one-five-oh,” she says.

In October 2011 she took to the road, crisscrossing the country with a digital recorder and the intent to turn memories and interviews into artwork. It was a herculean task. In addition to recording and painting, she had to solicit funding for herself and secure exhibition places to display her upcoming show. “I had very little luck pitching the project to the funding agencies,” she says. “It was massive and very difficult to explain.”

Quiet Stories was a people project so she went to the people, asking for help and money. “In some cases I looked for an institution I knew would show my work. In other occasions I looked for a residency program that would get me to a place I hadn’t been to before,” she says. The residencies, which lasted anywhere from four days to several months, became her entry point into the community.

“In Inglis, Man., I worked with the Inglis Grain Elevators National Historic Site heritage committee (the town’s five elevators are deemed a national treasure) and had them pick 25 people from the community for me to interview,” Cline says. After she completed the interviews, the community held a pie sale. “They did really well,” she says, “It covered my artist fees.” However, in Vernon, B.C., she had to pay the residency fees herself, a justifiable expense, she says, that introduced her to the Okanagan country.

In total, Cline compiled more than 200 interviews with Canadians aged six to 92, asking them about their childhood, their families, and pivotal moments in their lives. The exhibit opened in Yorkton, Sask., last January, and will move on to other galleries in western Canada throughout 2017. Some of the paintings are literal renditions of a specific place, while others are more iconic, like a country road or a waterfall. When an elderly Chinese man in Kelowna, B.C., spoke to her about racism he encountered in his life, Cline painted the town’s Chinese cemetery. “For me, that went with all his stories about the Chinese community. A lot of the paintings have symbolic overtones.” And to make the point, Cline has installed speaker boxes next to the painting the recording has inspired.

She’s disappointed she didn’t have enough time to paint Atlantic Canada or the far North. “I kind of ran out of time,” she says, “but I learned your experience of geography isn’t limited to the place you’re in at the moment. In Alberta, I spoke with a lot of people with Maritime connections. I also talked to a lot of French-Canadians in Manitoba.” As she travelled across the country, she was surprised to find more similarities than differences.

Older folk, for instance, had much in common with newly arrived Canadians. “There was a rawness to their growing up that echoed the rawness of the immigrant struggle,” she says. “Immigrants had similar stories with First Nation peoples about displacement.”

Part of the scope of the project was to show how everyday places have added meaning through the people that experience them, she says. And in that regard, Quiet Stories delivers a consistent message: “I heard stories of death, dislocation, and intolerance, but many of the stories conveyed a sense of everyday people finding love and joy in their family and their surroundings.”

art courtesy Greg Smith

Inside The Weakerthans’ bassist Greg Smith’s studio

Beer in hand, Greg Smith sits in a chair wedged into a corner. A microphone stand, angled overhead, partially frames him. The room is full of instruments: four- and six-stringed guitars on stands, a mandolin hanging from a hook, a drum kit and keyboards facing one another.

But the space is meant for more than music. A folded-up easel, stacks of brushes and tubes of paint spread on a tray and walls covered in canvases in various stages of completion attest to that.

“I really want to develop a whole body of work,” says Smith, who plays bass for the Weakerthans, and guitar and vocals for his own band, the Très Bien Ensemble.

Springing out of his chair, gesturing from the floor to the wall with two open hands, he asks, “Can I take what I do here and put it there?”

Smith first asked himself that question while on tour with the Weakerthans. While on the road he was often struck by an environment (urban and rural), scene, object or motif. He then sketched what he saw, or committed it to memory. In 2007, he began to produce paintings of the strongest studies and memories. With subsequent tours, he painted more. (A Smith painting appears on the cover of the band’s last release, Live from the Burton Cummings Theatre.)

From the start, Smith has made abstract, expressive work, driven, like music, by “rhythm and heat” and “energy.” He uses acrylic paint “because you can work fast with it,” he explains. “You can build the paint up, it dries fast and it’s easy to clean.” Right now he works on canvas, building up the paint to get texture. He first painted on board, buying wood off-cuts from Home Depot. The grain and knots helped shape the process and end product.

There are small, square and abstracted portraits of authors Smith likes, such as Margaret Atwood and poet bill bissett. Larger, rectangular and vertical views to towers and high rises suggest an interest in light and shadow, and how the two interact and are interdependent in the built environment. Smith applies the paint in one long brushstroke, allowing it to thin, the colour to fade and for the white of the canvas to show through. (Mind you this is one of the unfinished works in his studio.)

In one of two large works in progress, the outline of a hogweed plant is recognizable. The plant appears to loom, imposing itself on the viewer. But Smith intends the inverse: “I want to give it this reverential viewpoint.” By doing so he challenges a commonly held view of an invasive species. Can we ever accept them as belonging, beautiful?

There’s truth in that approach, according to Matt James, a book illustrator and old friend of Smith’s. James, Smith, and another artist, illustrator Glen Halsey, share the space, which is actually an apartment over a bar in Parkdale, a west-end Toronto neighbourhood.

“What I find most inspiring is the freedom that he allows himself,” says James by email.

Smith and James, who won the 2013 Governor General’s Literary Award for Illustration for his book, Northwest Passage, met in high school in Woodstock, Ont., some 25 years ago. They bonded over music, such as punk’s visual cues and culture. Both were drawn to Toronto’s music and art communities. (Smith originally enrolled at George Brown College to study graphic design. After barely a semester there was a strike and he never went back.)

“It can be kind of helpful to see your own art through someone else’s eyes from time to time,” says James on his ongoing “exchange” with Smith. “But ultimately the best thing he could say to me or me to him is ‘keep going!’ or, maybe, ‘stop!'”

For now, Smith comes to the studio two or three times a week to paint and jam. He has plenty to keep him going in both pursuits. He’s looking for his next opportunity to show his art—he’s done so publicly three times—and work on new songs has begun.