WINTER WORDS, Aylsbury, Sask., November 18, 2004. Oil on paper, 18.5 x 30 in.

 

Grassland and grassland, mile after mile. There were straight roads here, and little farming towns with grain elevators. All this was marvelously welcome to me. "Why do I love it so much?" I said... "Is it because it isn't scenery?
-- Alice Munro

The wide-open spaces of Saskatchewan seem the antithesis of what Alice Munro called "scenery". They're not hemmed in by trees and interrupted by "views." They're "everywhere all-at-once."

The Saskatchewan prairies are the big part of Canada that the Group of Seven didn't paint. "Bury me not on the lone prairie," lamented A. Y. Jackson. "I could do nothing with the place." Because of their apparent lack of scenery, the open prairies haven't been much painted by anyone. Even painters who've flourished in Saskatchewan have preferred the river valleys in the plains or the aspen parkland to the north and east. While I admire and have absorbed much from them, I'm drawn south and west to the grasslands -- partly because I was born and raised in Regina, but also because the color and light there is so luminous. And because the solutions found by painters from the past don't work well in the wide-open spaces, I look for new ones.

It has been said that due to their familiarity with wide horizons Saskatchewan natives make good seamen. Maybe so. In any event, when I'm in Victoria for that very reason I look out to sea.

A word about materials: Many of these paintings are painted with oil paint on paper: high quality rag watercolour paper. This medium is by no means new, having been used by artists as accomplished as Corot and Vuillard. Their paintings, not protected by glass, have stood the test of time both physically and aesthetically.

Terry Fenton

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LAND AND SEA

A selection of paintings of prairie and sea subjects
some to be shown at Winchester Galleries, Victoria, October 10-30, 2004

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You are painting some seriously good pictures, Fenton. Some of the color, and the affinity of the pictures with the landscapes (not just looking like but feeling like) is eerie.

-- Walter Darby Bannard, Sept 7/04

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Late Light	Competition	Weak Disturbance
Disbelief	Premonition	Foray
Theorem	Illumination	Oriflamme
New Bearings	Eastward	Afloat
Byword	Margin	Weathering
Haze	Anthem	Luminance
Bell and Candle	Tacitus on Top	Death of the Heart

ANDREW'S NUDE 1971	PATH IN WHITE MUDE RAVINE, 1981	MORNING LAKE LOUISE, 1981
WEND, 1983	ZIG-ZAG, 1984	EVENING, TOBY CREEK, 1984
BUGABOO CREEK, 1984	BLACK GALLAGHER, 1988	TWO SYMPHONIES, 1989
JOY SPRING, 1991	BETWEEN SNOWS, 1992	SPECTRE, 1993
LAST LOOK, 1991	PULPIT, 1996	FRATERNAL, 1997