A Brush with Life - Issue #60 A Favourite Time Of Year

September is often like the second new year for us. Studio visits are happening, edges are being painted, hanging wires added and new work put into inventories. The artists’ studios are vibrant and full.

We are preparing for new shows in the gallery for the beginning of October. In our last issue there were a few hints about what is to come and we should be able to give you a few works to preview soon. By October 7, 2020, we will have new paintings on the gallery walls of the Arbutus Room and in the Garden Room a week later on October 14, 2020. We will remain open by appointment for the fall and winter, as long as there isn’t a health directive requesting otherwise. The gallery is basically a very limited touch zone and we all keep our distance and where masks and, for now, we can keep the windows and doors open. However, we will continue with our increased online activities and finding the best ways for you to view the work right from your home. More about these options shortly.

Last Browse of Current Shows

Do take a few minutes and slip in for a good long browse of our current shows. The gallery preview at the top on these links allows you to see some of the work in the context of each show. Plus, with each painting you can use the “view in room” option under the main image to see the painting in scale perspective.

Here is the Garden Room solo show with a selection of Terrill Welch’s paintings...

Island Time Summer 2020 with Contemporary Canadian Landscape Painter Terrill Welch | Terrill Welch Gallery | Artsy

Current show featuring works by Terrill Welch at Terrill Welch Gallery Mayne Island, 478 Village Bay Rd Jun 2nd – Oct 11th

And here is the Arbutus Room group show with Glenda King, Jody Waldie, Jennifer Peers and Terrill Welch...

Arbutus Room Summer Group Show 2020 | Terrill Welch Gallery | Artsy

Current show featuring works by Terrill Welch, Jody Waldie, Glenda King and Jennifer Peers at Terrill Welch Gallery Mayne Island, 478 Village Bay Rd May 28th – Oct 4th

“View In Room” a little different in the Artsy App

Okay, this is an exciting option! At least we are excited. The Terrill Welch Gallery has a new tool for you to assist you with your exploration and decision-making. There is free Artsy App for your phone that will allow you to use the “view in room” option in a different way than on the website. The App allows you to view a painting in YOUR OWN room. It is quite a straightforward process of pointing your phone at the floor and moving it slowly up and around for Technology to do triangular measures of your room and then you “set” the bar at the floor line and place the painting.

The gallery did offer this feature through another platform in the past but it was a lot of work to manage both for the interested art collectors and for the gallery. This new option through the Artsy platform is much smoother and responsive.

Our one tip, from our own exploration of the option, would be to hang a dark string or two coloured stickies that mark the height of the painting on the wall so that you know that the app has measured the room correctly to get an accurate perspective. In the gallery, we were able to use the painting itself to determine if it was indeed displaying correctly. It did take a few tries to “get it” and we wouldn’t have known unless we had the height of the actual painting on the wall to compare with. As you can see, it doesn’t give you the effects of lighting on the painting. But you can move around the room a little while viewing the painting on your phone to see what it might look like from different angles. You will be able to do this process from the Artsy App with any of our paintings in the Artsy online gallery portfolio.

Anyway, something else to play with. Your subscription name and log in for Artsy is the same for the app. Have fun... and follow the gallery and your favourite gallery artists while you are there. We will have new work going up each week as we prepare for our next physical and online shows. This way you get first viewing.

Multiple Detail Views For Each Paintings

In addition to the “view in room” for your OWN room option that the Artsy App provides, we are working at getting multiple detailed views up for each painting in our shows. We have can also show you the sides and back of paintings in this same way. We are wondering if this is of interest or is something like what we did for this painting enough to give you a good sense of the work from online?

Terrill Welch | Morning With Arbutus Trees (2019) | Available for Sale | Artsy

Available for sale from Terrill Welch Gallery, Terrill Welch, Morning With Arbutus Trees (2019), Oil on canvas, 36 × 48 in

Once you have opened the link, to see the various images, there is a light grey arrow on the right beside the painting image in a tablet view. Click on these and it will take you to the next image. On your phone you can just swipe to see the next image. Let us know what you think and if the back and sides would be nice to see in detail as well.

Still on Terrill’s Easel

I was plein air painting the other day and what a difference perspective can make!

During the pandemic, painting in public places takes a little more planning to be able to relax and paint without watching out for people come right up behind me and looking over my shoulder. I don’t mind people looking. I just prefer to know that they are there so I am able to step back and they can come up and look. This way everyone keeps their distance. My strategy for this morning was to drop down over the edge of the bank where it is not super easy walking to reach me... and people can see just fine from above.

People did came along of course and would at first say - oh my!

Followed by - what a beautiful spot you have to paint!

I would affirm and we would chat for a bit and then I would keep painting.

It wasn’t until I was packing up and taking things back to the car that I realized... we definitely didn’t have the same view. The perspectives were indeed dramatically different.

How often in a day does this happen about a whole bunch of different things I wonder?

I finished the work up in the studio the following afternoon.

It is still needs to dry and such but is done I think.

“Morning Sea at Georgina Point” resting by Terrill Welch, 16 x 20 inch, walnut oil on canvas.

Artist notes: The first day of September and the morning was warm in the sun but cool already in the shade. There is a very slight breeze, one of those that waited to be notice.

Opinion Piece by Terrill Welch

I look back on my social media posts and it sometime seems as if I simply, blithely, paint away and the world moves around my canvases. I assure you this is NOT the case! All the spaces in between are full to overlapping. I sometimes push the rest of my life back like a restless sea rearranging driftwood along the shores.

This is likely true for most painters and particularly true for landscape painters who often swing freely like sensitive weathervanes, knowing no real beginning or end to what one might call “work”.

My days are more about rhythms than schedules. Beautiful or flat light doesn’t care so much about a specific time. This means everything else must work around the best light possible. Studio visits for the gallery artists are organized by the best natural light to view the paintings. Plein air times are adjusted for the best light to paint. Finishing the work on a painting is decided by the best light to work in the studio with a combination of natural light and studio lamps.

Supper times are moved around. Bill paying and inventory work is squeezed in between writing the gallery’s newsletter. Groceries are pick up as the last egg goes into the caste-iron frying pan. Fresh produce is gathered from the farm stands and washed and transferred to bowls, offering snacks on the fly. Laundry is done between brushstrokes as the painter steps back to see what else is needed. Phone calls are returned while cleaning the brushes in the sink at the end of a painting session. Walks to study the landscape and gather references are part of daily exercise requirements. Social media post that share the process and promoting paintings happens during early morning coffee. And so it goes, from one day to the next until years have passed with 30 - 40 works being released and more than half of these having been either picked up or shipped to art collectors around North America and beyond.

It is an interesting, inspiring and challenging life... but I don’t get to blithely paint all day. I wish I did sometimes. But the truth is that this intriguing bit of the work is likely less than 30% of what all must be done to keep things rolling along. I apologize if it seems that I have mislead you with the most exciting bits.

What Has Sold

We have had an additional two sales this two week period. The first is “Charlie’s Boathouse” by Jennifer Peers. Our congratulations to both the art collector and to Jennifer as these lovely reflections find themselves a new home.

The painting is still hung in the Arbutus Room displaying its red dot 🔴 if you are on island and wish to see it before the work goes off into a private collection.

The second work that has sold is a plein air painting sketch by Terrill Welch that hadn’t been released yet.

What Terrill is Reading

I had a birthday at the end of August and a painter friend gave me the following...

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge - Rainer Maria Rilke - Oxford University Press

'An indescribable, aching, futile longing for myself'... The young Danish aristocrat Malte Laurids Brigge has been left rootless by the early death of his parents. Now living in Paris, Malte begins to record his life in a series of loosely connected notes, diary entries, prose poems, parables and stories, ostensibly collected by a fictional editor to form the Notebooks.

And in a few notes from Wikipedia, “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge was Rainer Maria Rilke's only novel, and is said to have greatly influenced such other writers as Jean-Paul Sartre. It was written whilst Rilke lived in Paris, and was published in 1910. The novel is semi-autobiographical, and is written in an expressionistic style.…The book was first issued in English under the title Journal of My Other Self.”

I am just getting started so I have no real opinions or impressions to offer yet but I thought some of you may have read the work or would be interested in reading it over the fall and winter.

Growing pains - Where to find all of Terrill’s paintings

I had the largest art collector of my paintings comment that she went to search for my work only to find it in several places and could I please just give her that one spot to be able to view all my work in one place so she can decide on her next painting. I said indeed I could do this. So here it is for you as well.

Art by Terrill Welch | Artwork Archive

View the full portfolio of artwork from Terrill Welch

Just so you know, each of our represented artists have a similar online gallery for their work as well. The links are still all available for each artist on the “Featured Artists”page of the website below. Or you can just ask and we will point you in the right direction.

Featured Artists in the Terrill Welch Gallery - Canadian Contemporary Terrill Welch Gallery, West Coast Landscape Paintings

The Terrill Welch Gallery's new Arbutus Room features west coast landscape paintings of three other artists along with her own work. The Terrill Welch Gallery now has two rooms. The original main Garden Room of the gallery will continue to showcase the work of Internationally collected contemporary landscape painter Terrill Welch paintings. We will have…

Until later!

We trust the preceding offerings shall hold your art collector’s interest for the next couple of weeks as we begin to upload new work for the upcoming shows. If you get a chance during my favourite time of year, do go out and enjoy our fine September weather. And as always, I look forward to your notes in reply to various points of interest from the issue. ~ Terrill :) 👩‍🎨🎨❤️

Terrill Welch Gallery | Artists, Art for Sale, and Contact Info | Artsy

Our gallery program brings extraordinary connections to ordinary moments in our natural landscape. The Terrill Welch Gallery opened in August 2017. Since then, the gallery has more than doubled its physical gallery exhibition space and online reach.