Nickle Arts
Ordinary people and their ordinary lives drawn with ordinary pencil on ordinary paper. Some of the drawings from the Mackie Donation on display at Nickel Galleries are on paper a bare step up from the back of an envelope shiny and creased undulating under the constraints of the glass. Yet it is a far from ordinary collection — over 130 works by some of Canada’s most renowned artists rescued from the Calgary flood of 2013 under extraordinary circumstances. A collection by an artist and her husband built over a lifetime the drawings themselves cover a timeline of more than 100 years. However the simplicity of the media belies the complexity of the message. Canada’s history is presented here: gargantuan mountains and empty plains ice walls and glacial boulders landscapes scarred by industrialization logging and grain elevators homesteads and the heavy burden of the plough.
In “Untitled” (1979) Arthur McKay conveys the infinite Saskatchewan sky on a page the size of the average high school jotter with a drawing so minimal the page is almost empty. One can feel the unbroken breeze and the golden light. On the same wall “Wheels” (Gregory Harland Arnold 1965) looks like a doodled version of the Death Star and a satellite. It could be our earth now a concrete jungle churning eternally through the vacuum of space.
Home is a recurrent theme. James Cousins Marshall’s “Original Homestead (Summer)” (1975) is so perfect so detailed that every leaf rustles on every tree every blade of clipped grass tickles the barefoot runner. But the savagery of the native land and its destruction cannot be suppressed manicured and idealized. A few feet away David Pugh’s “Douglas Fir IX” is like being punched in the face by a lumberjack. Jack Shadbolt’s mangle of old boats reeks of loss of salty tarp and stagnant pools.
The diversity of landscape is matched by a diversity of people. Portraits so tender so delicate so carefully unfolded and revealed like Arthur Lismer’s portrait of a South African woman (1936) or Gerald Tailfeather’s hunter thundering after bison on horseback (“The Hunt” 1966). The gamut of human experience is documented. Ron (Gyo-Zo) Spickett’s dancing women are off-kilter dervishes transcending human consciousness (“Laughing Series” 1973). Whereas Marcia Perkins’ sitters are all too firmly planted in mundane reality. “Faye” (1986) sits wearing a V-necked sweater but no knickers. Beside her “Mark” (1984) lies on a chair naked but for his diamond patterned socks. They may be in separate frames but they are definitely married.
Speaking of marriage there is a second part to the exhibition. It is on the face of it wholly unconnected to the Mackie drawings. For example there is a very large multi-panelled work by Ron Moppett (“Early One Morning [Keats]” 2007). It overlaps pastoral scenes with scraps of festive wrapping paper collage cut-outs and probably the most opaquely painted rendition of clear glass one is ever likely to see magnificent in hues of magenta and lime green. The work is accompanied by preliminary sketches and collages showing the progress from first sketch to final piece. Sylvat Aziz’s “Shamiyanah: Bazaar Wall” (1988-1992) takes up two full walls of the gallery and impresses on the viewer a blisteringly colourful market full of shapes in burkas graffiti-esque Arabic script and angry gesticulating men. All this within six feet of drawings that wouldn’t be out of place in my granny’s sitting room. The exhibition embodies what Edmund De Waal describes in his book The Hare with Amber Eyes as “A conversation between a particular kind of the old and the very new in art”. Extraordinary.
Fine Lines: Drawings from the Nickle Collection and the Mackie Donation on exhibition until August 23 at Nickle Galleries.
