Dec 28, 2018 5 min read

A Brush with Life - Issue #16 A Painter’s Guide to the New Year

At the close of each year, I reach back and pick up the best bits and toss them forward, leaving stepping stones for the year ahead. In this way, I am fortunate because this year, I have so many solid and elegant gems for tossing.Gathering a monk’s collection of polished simplicity, I find myself pr

Gathering a monk’s collection of polished simplicity, I find myself preparing for painting adventures with a traveling bag full of painting problems, desires, half-baked ideas and unknowns. My meagre tools and methods are but a few hundred years old. Will they be enough? Am I enough?....

After all, works of art are always the results of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.

(Rainer Maria Rilke - Letters on Cézanne, 1907. Published in English in 2002)

This quote opens up the introduction by Elena Maslova-Levin of our catalogue Conversations on Edge that was published in the spring of 2018 for our two-artist show in the Terrill Welch Gallery on Mayne Island in British Columbia. Excerpts of Maslova-Levin’s introduction about my work is one of the pebbles of observation I am tossing forward...

Landscape painting might not seem like a particularly dangerous adventure: you take your easel, and paints, and a canvas, and go outside, and paint what you see. What danger can be there?

It is the danger of seeing what nobody else has seen, the danger of shattering conventional and comfortable visual reality.

Paul Cézanne once said that Claude Monet was “just an eye, but what an eye!”

This remark may seem disparaging - unless you know what it takes to see what your eyes really see. Every human being receives an infinite richness of visual information every waking moment, but the brain habitually filters out almost all of it, and builds a simplified picture of visual reality for the mind to consume, based mostly on what we already know. This mechanism is there to protect us, and it takes both courage and mastery to switch it off, and to fully open your mind to the unspeakable infinity of world’s beauty. To go through the experience of seeing all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.

Although a student of Claude Monet’s in many ways, with an eye as attentive and discerning as his, Terrill Welch is much more than an eye. The space of her paintings is more than the familiar three-dimensional space of visual reality. It encompasses not just vision, but all sensory dimensions of human experience - the sound of silence, the smell of distant snow, the cool touch of shadows, the taste of ocean water (and, occasionally, a hearty winter lunch, too). This is how she inhabits the multidimensional space of ever-present Now. That’s how she fills with life and light what might seem like empty space to a lazy eye.

It is this multidimensional space that opens up from the deceptively two-dimensional surface of her paintings. We see not only the visible, but the invisible too. And this experience - a peak visual experience - can expand your sense of vision, your perception of reality, and ultimately, your consciousness, but only if you allow yourself to fully see how she feels her way into the space of a landscape and fuses it with her inner space.

Her paintings invite us to share in the treasure she brings back from where no one can go any further.

This excerpt is the criteria I shall use to select my personal, in no particular order, SEVEN out of twenty-seven BEST of 2018 paintings - these are the painting pebbles that I shall toss lightly ahead of me as I move into the stream of a new year.

(Note: three of these works are already in private collections. I haven’t identified which ones but if you click on the painting and find that it is sold I don’t want you to be surprised.)