A Brush with Life - Issue #126 Scratching the Earth’s Surface
The current show in the Terrill Welch Gallery Pod is “Scratching the Earth's Surface" and most of these paintings will remain until June 12, 2023. Then a new collection or flow of paintings will be featured. As you know, we are OPEN DAILY 11-4 for walk in self-browsing at 428 Luff Rd, Mayne Island BC, Canada. You may request to purchase either directly from our private viewing room now from online or while visiting the gallery pod in person by using a QR code posted beside the door in the gallery pod and on the back of the new postcards on the bench. This QR code brings you directly to this private viewing room. This technology is easy to use if your phone's camera system has QR code capacity. Simply point your phone camera at the image of the QR code and the website will appear. Click on the website and there you go! If this doesn't work for your phone, then just call or send me a text and I will be able to assist you directly with further information.
More about the “Scratching the Earth’s Surface” show: Finding natural landscapes without human intervention are less than plentiful. For thousands of years humans have been scratching the earth’s surface. We have cleared, mined, planted and grazed. We have dammed waterways. We have cut into the earths surface with trails and roads. We have crossed rivers with bridges and seas with ships. We have set up beacons along shores to guide our passage and built cities that forever persist in an uneasy relationships with what was once there before. While destructive, these scratched surfaces are also frequently stunningly beautiful! From May 16 to June 12 2023, the Terrill Welch Gallery Pod will show Terrill’s paintings that hold these tensions in our landscapes between what is natural and our human built points of intervention. The paintings interpret areas of the southwest coast of British Columbia, the province of Prince Edward Island and also Aix en Provence, France. There are paintings from both “The Red Line Series” and Terrill’s newest “Thriving in Place” series.
We have far more paintings to share within this theme than space. As a result, this is a rolling show where some paintings will be exchanged for other paintings every few days or weeks. As you can see in the video tour that was done when the show first opened some of these works are now different...
So far, the response from local visitors and those visiting from Victoria and Vancouver, B.C. and Calgary, Alberta has been favourable to this show. One of our youngest repeat gallery visitors recently he brought his great aunt to show her the gallery.
To give our new guest an idea about what to expect he confided - "she has candies in the gallery for us when we visit you know."
The Terrill Welch Gallery spaces have always been a welcoming of young visitors and some paintings are purposefully place low for their viewing pleasure.
NEW RELEASES AND WORK REVISITED
Over the past month since our last issue, I have been painting, painting edges and revisiting paintings. These are the links to these new and revisited works. Enjoy!
NEW QUARTERLY PUBLICATION SCHEDULE STARTING IN JULY for “A Brush with Life”
In recognition of my semi retirement starting in August and the fact that I will be focusing all of my resources on painting and showing my own work exclusively, the free “A Brush with Life” publication will be published on a quarterly rather than monthly schedule starting on the first Friday in July and then the first Friday of October, January and April. The content will remain mostly the same with the gallery pod show schedule either becoming an ongoing rolling show or timed to open just ahead of these quarterly publications. I am excited about this simplfication because it will allow more time for painting and ease the separation between the free "A Brush with Life" and paid "Terrill Welch by Herself" subscriptions.
REMAINING A MONTHLY PUBLICATION - “Terrill Welch by Herself”
The paid subscription publication of “Terrill Welch by herself” is going to remain a monthly issue because it is the perfect rhythm for my artist’s process focus going forward. Paid subscribers receive first opportunities to purchase work no matter where they see it. Therefore, if these paid subscribers also follow me on social media, they can put in a request to consider or purchase a work before it reaches the next paid newsletter issue. In fact, this happened just this past week! However, I plan on being on social media much less as well and not all work will end up being shared on these platforms with any kind of consistency. My current daily screen time for all viewing, work and pleasure, is between 5-6 hours a day. I am not sure I can get it lower than this and still keep the online and physical parts of the business viable. Ideally, I am aiming for a 4-5 hour a day weekly average. We shall see. To me this still seems like a lot of screen time! But I need time to write, put work into the inventory program, take and process videos, edit art process photographs, gather and edit photograph references, read and reply to emails and text messages as well as watch the news and a show with my husband in the evening now and again.
Therefore, the easiest way to keep up with new work being created and released and my life stories as an artist and human being will be through a paid subscription to “Terrill Welch by Herself” that is $36 CAD annually. This fee of $3 an issue helps to pay for the cost of the newsletter platform and supports the work that I do to record and share my creative process. I am very grateful to our current paid subscribers who seem to be enjoying each issue with gusto! I would love it if more of you joined them in this adventure. If you need any assistance to figure out how to subscribe, send me an email at tawelch@shaw.ca and I will see what I can do to offer assistance.
Alternatively, if a paid subscription seems like more than you can manage, it will still be possible to go directly to our online gallery when you want to see what is available or write to me directly and ask about what is new. Either will work and be supported by the free quaterly publichation of "A Brush with Life."
THREE NEW PAINTINGS
Speaking of our paid subscriber and the art collectors who asked for a work to be set aside until their next visit to Mayne Island in a couple of weeks, we have a new plein air that was painted (with permission) from private property.
I love the history of paint marks that layers of acrylic paint leave behind. It is the one advantage of this paint over oil paint. Nothing ever seems to truly disappear… in a good way.
“A Secluded Haven by the Sea” by Terrill Welch, 8 x 10 inch acrylic on gessobord. (On hold until at least June 20th)
Artist notes: Some places are meant to be visited repeatedly. Each time more is revealed to the visitors. I am sure I shall be back again with my easel to stand by this shore to make overlapping marks.
On this evening, our small group of island painters who regularly connect for studio and artistic company went down to this special place along the shore of Active Pass. We have a standing invitation to paint here and I simply send a quick text to the owner to let him know the date and make sure we will not be intruding. It was a grand evening!
I made a few changes on this quick painting sketch back in the studio.
I believe, its freshness is still intacted.
Next, the lilacs are finished but those blue purple perennial cornflower - Centaura montana is still holding on in a special flower arrangement that arrived at our house. I decided to add them to my interior painting composition.
"I have changed this small work so many times and thought I was done last evening. But this morning I woke up, looked at it and changed it again. Sometimes it goes like this. It is done… I think" 🧐 ~ Terrill Welch
But it wasn't! Now it is done...
Artist notes: I am sitting at the kitchen table listening to a lecture on zoom in the middle of the woods that we call home. Thriving in place isn’t always about being outside. Sometimes it is about longing to be outside… and then the sky and the sun fill the room.
I followed this painting study with a larger work of water lilies that started as a plein air. I channel my best Monet standing in front of the lillies in our Mayne Island Japanese Memorial Garden pond. Here we have a roughed in 24 x 30 inch oil painting of water lilies in the garden sitting on a French Box easel with a large 2 inch brush resting in the palette box below. The easel and painting are embedded in the sun-soaked garden that is partially reflected on the canvas.
It was a glorious day despite an abundance of tent caterpillars in the cherry tree beside me landing on me and my painting set up.
I continued in the studio with more mark making as a tribute to the contemporary abstract painter Oscar Murillo... and yes, he likes to scribble.
In the final painting session, I finished the painting using my own sensibilities.
You might ask - why do a painting in this way? Why not just paint like you usually do Terrill?
The answer is that this approach gives homage to those that came before us and those of our contemporary peers who are currently influencing the social and political space of art. In this way, the work becomes more grounded and richer than if I simply went to the garden and did my own usual painting process. Of course, we can never truly leave ourselves out of our work. However, this painting is about purposefully holding a conversation with these two artists as my brushes swing from palette to canvas.
"Pond in the Japanese Memorial Garden"is still wet and shiny as it "rests" awaiting a final photograph and to get its edges painted.
This painting is more about abstract interpretations of my subject than visual representation. I am completing it as part of a six week online class with Wendy Welch (no relative) at Vancouver Island School of Art. I fell in love with the suggested approach for this week’s painting requirements and have taken it a bit further to make it my own and so it will work for me… and for you, hopefully. 😊
These works will become publicly available June 23rd unless a paid subscriber to “Terrill Welch by Herself” has purchased them ahead of this date.
“SPRING TO SUMMER” IN ISLAND TIME ART CLOSES JUNE 20, 2023
Our group “Spring to Summer" show in ISLAND TIME ART still has a couple of weeks before it closes and I do hope you get a chance to visit it online at the link above or in person. You won’t be disappointed!
UNTIL NEXT TIME
Thank you for taking the time to read this latest issue and if you enjoyed what I have shared, please feel free to give it a thumbs up below or leave us a comment. Amidst whatever challenges life is offering you, I hope this pause to visit with my paintings offers you a reprieve and possibly some solace if this is what you need.
You see, paintings really don’t care if they are purchased. In fact, the concept is foreign and beyond comprehension to the brushstrokes that shape themselves in various forms on different surfaces.
Paintings just like to be seen and have a continuing conversation with you. It is this simple. Whether it is online or in a gallery space, viewing original art is an opportunity for a deep and intimate visit with what is presented. Over the weeks and months to come, my intention is to spend more time painting and in a less demanding rhythm. I am not sure if it is actually possible to paint less because my painting practice has its own pace that is habitually established. We shall see. Either way, I am determined to simplify the demands on my artist's work life into something that resembled semi-retirement by the end of August this year! In the meantime, I wish you all the best on these longest days in the northern hemisphere and manylongand meaningful conversations with my paintings however it is you might get to be with them.
Until next time!
Terrill 🎨❤
"These paintings are an invitation to join me in exploring this relationship between the innate elements of our environment and ourselves. My intention is for viewers to find themselves within these landscapes as I have - filled with curiosity, wonder, discovery and a desire to survive. It is a tall order for a painter with a brush and a canvas. Yet, I must try. I must keep painting until we pause before the work and weep in our knowing - without our natural world, we will no longer exist. It is my sacred practice as a landscape painter to ensure that this message reaches into the hearts of humanity. This is my mission - my in-progress life's work." ~ Terrill Welch
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