Dec 20, 2024 15 min read art show

Terrill Welch by herself - issue #25 We Come From The Sea

I must be honest and acknowledge that since our issue, it has been a bit of an unexpected adventure. Directly following my return from Vancouver on Sunday, November 24, 2024, from my son’s low key and most enjoyable wedding celebrations, at ten minutes to seven in the evening, David fell and broke his hip as he was getting up from his chair to come and greet me at the door. The next few weeks have been a bit of a blur between ambulance, water taxi ambulance and another ambulance to get to Victoria General Hospital where we were greeted by an over crowded emergency unit at 11:00 pm. The first responders managed to get David just inside the double set of storm doors and a little to the side where, for the next three hours, people reached over top of his head to push the button to open and close the doors. Someone scrounged me a chair to sit at the end of the bed once they had him off the gurney. Just after 2:00 am a porter came to take David for x-rays and I tagged a long. To my delight, there was a bathroom in the waiting area… and it was quiet.

Very shortly after we came back down, the charge nurse came to get David moved into the hallway of the emergency unit and out of the holding area. At that point, I went and found a hotel and a shower and a bed to hover over until morning when David’s daughter came to pick me up after dropping the grandchildren off at school. We both hung out with David in the hallway of the emergency while we waited for word that there was room in the hallway on the 5th floor south unit. Once there, things began to improve with each step until he final got a room about the size of a walk-in closet with no bathroom but it had oxygen and most importantly for David, it was quiet and private. David had his surgery and a partial right hip replacement on Tuesday morning November 26, 2024 and has been on the road to recovery ever since.

I brought him home on Sunday, December 8, 2024 with a bed rail and toilet supports installed and the bed move and the door taken off the ensuite bathroom for an easier access. Thank goodness for the help of family and friends! I had picked up a transport wheelchair to get him from the car into the house and was grateful I had it, even if it did sink into the wet soft ground and take more muscles than I expected to get it (and David) around to the side of the house for level access. Besides the wheelchair, David is the proud owner of an inside aluminum walker, an outside four wheel walker, a car cane and several pairs of brand new grippy socks with chocolates inside - an early Christmas present from good friends. We have home support for three times a week to help with David’s personal care for an hour at 8:00 am which will allow me a break and to go do some of my field work and reference gathering for my Master’s of Fine Art programme. Community nursing came on Wednesday, December 11, 2024 to take out the 30 or so staples and everything is healing nicely. David and I do his bed physio and standing exercises and we play follow the leader around and around the house doing loops for his walking exercise. We will continue with inside walking until sometime in the new year. Like any break, full healing takes 6 to 8 weeks and a person wants to be extra careful not to fall during this time and yet still move around to keep muscles strong and joints flexible. For the New Year, we have physio in place for a combination of virtual video and in person sessions in Sidney if the weather and our energy allows. We still have our wonderful house cleaner one day a week and we have booked her a second day for light duty to visit with David and to do special things he would like done while I go and get groceries on both of the days she is here. In addition, I have kept up with my school assignments, reopened the gallery pod, finished a small painting, continued working in a larger painting and took on a commitment to complete a small commission.

This said, everything is going well if we take all things into considered! We are most thankful for our family, friends, medical services and total strangers for their support in all kinds of ways. We are also feeling clever that we have our wonderful home perfectly set up due to the last renovation for an adventures just like this one. We are most fortunate in so many ways!

And on that note, we shall get on with what else is new and interesting.…

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN THE STUDIO

For the latest small painting of a varnish clamshell in a seasonal stream next to the tide line, the making process begins with a few paint marks in walnut oils on an 8 x 10 inch linen on board surface with a solid red oil ground. I wanted the solid foundation that this deep red will offer to the much lighter overpainting.

I have a short video from my field work and reference gathering that I play several times as I work. It is the shapes and movement balanced by the flashes of light sparkling in the water that is most interesting me. I reach down into my memories of the soft ripples of water caressing the clamshell and set down the broadest of brush marks onto the painting surface.

My intention for this work is to instil a sense of inner peace, resilience and wellbeing. The work is a reminder of who I am after a stressful and tumultuous couple of weeks. I need this making process almost as much as I need to breathe. I can feel myself centre and my shoulders relax as I work.

I now sit writing these notes as the December afternoon low sun streams into the studio and across the kitchen beside where I am sitting. The house is quiet. A soft breeze moves the branches gently on the large fir trees outside the window. I am grateful for this rural bounty. I am grateful for life. I am grateful for the technology that allows me to capture bits of my world and the tools to create passages of conversation with our surrounding environment, particularly the sea, the Salish Sea if I want to be more specific. Even when I cannot physically get there, the sea remains close to me as the tides move back and forth against the edges of my memory. The small work now rests in front of the larger painting I will continue working on before daylight tomorrow.

And here we have, still shiny and wet, “Varnish Clamshell in the Flow” by Terrill Welch, 8 x 10 inch walnut oil on linen board. Completed December 10, 2024.

Artist notes: I had gone to Bennett Bay and along the beach to where a seasonal creek was flowing into the sea and washing over seashells along the way. These varnish clamshells created a light musical sound as the water passed over them. The beauty of the shapes and sounds create a textured resonance in my being. For those moments, inner peace is held, in those shapes, in those colours and those sounds. In my painting, I find inner peace in the abstracted loosen of the brushstrokes, gifted to the linen surface without misgivings or hesitation. This is the full body experience I aim to capture in this small painting completed in oil, wet-in-wet, in the studio a month later from when I physically stood on that shore.

It feels good to be back working in my physical studio again!

Earlier in November, I am working in the unknown on the edge of knowing. After watching Dr. Michele Whiting’s video lecture “Meaning Making/Making Meaning,” I am reminded of the power of full body memory. I am reminded about how much information is gathered that is not necessarily at first accessible through immediate recall of mental images or words but rather through sensations that were so very necessary before we developed a human capacity for language and naming – possibly the world of an infant or early humans. I sense that we do not lose these capacities and rather that they are often embedded beneath our quick short-hand ability to classify and organize information into meaning through naming and language of what we see and experience.

This brings me to the question of representation in art making, as distinct from visual imitation in art making. This has been a vexing problem for me and it is one I come back to again and again in my practice. Painting an ocean in my practice has less to do with the visual curve of a wave and much more to do with smell of the sea and the feel and temperature of the air and the impermanence of natural light and the specific sounds of water and shore birds – yet, in the end, there is often a wave and a horizon line that orients the viewer inside of the seascape, to feel as much as to observe this full body and sensory moment. I will not fully unpack this tension right at the moment but rather put the problem here as a placeholder to come back to again later.

Next, let’s have a look at the progress I have made on the 40 x 30 inch acrylic, oil and broken china on wood with the working title “Middens in Bennett Bay.”

I worked upside down to layout and attach the broken china.

Before doing this, I had developed the composition first with a few lines in pencil that I shared in the previous issue and then blocked in the underpainting with acrylic.

I have chosen a composition that is a vertical slice of earth revealed through erosion in such a way that the most of the surface has a narrow depth of field, holding space and time in the shapes of the shells and then releasing the viewer into an empty sky. For this work, flat colour is being considered for the aspects above ground combined with a more representational illusion of a three dimensional view below ground that is broken by the symbolic red line and broken china. This is then contained within the notion of a slice of earth exposing the passage of time. I am using the red line to represent climate impacts. Broken china is used to symbolize colonialism. The final colour of sky to represent space and mood. I am asking myself – what does it mean as a white woman of European settler culture in 2024 painting the eroding Indigenous middens from 4,000 or more years ago on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish People? Who is my intended audience?

Here is a close up of the bits of broken china before I attached it with heavy body acrylic medium to the red acrylic painted wood surface.

Next is to continue the over painting with oil paints. The overpainting, except for the red line, will not be so bright but I am not sure what shades of grey, green and muted blues and purples it will be yet.

This is as far as I have managed to get so far after the early morning painting session with my classmates in the United Kingdom. More to do yet!

INTRODUCTION TO ARTIST JOAN JONAS - “We come from the sea”

I have a daily 4 km circuit walk around our neighbourhood crescent that we have imagined for ourselves as a practical, low maintenance and enjoyable treadmill. Most days, I walk up the hill on Bowsprite Crescent, along Wood Dale Drive down the other side of Bowsprite Crescent and back to where I started and then around again, six times. Sometimes while I walk, I listen to music or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) national public radio.

On Monday, November 18, 2024, I decided to listen to CBC Radio One live with Nahlah Ayed and “Ideas in the Afternoon.” Ayed was presenting an interview by Mary Lynk with American artist Joan Jonas that was first published on CBC October 22, 2024. The interview had been done in July of this year and Joan Jonas is vibrant, engaging and 88 years old. I was still listening when I had finished my walk. When I came back into the house, I quickly wrote down the information to be able to find the podcast later.

The next day, I listened to the interview again. What has deeply intrigued me is Jonas’ remarks about the our human relationship to the sea:

“We come from the sea. We don’t think about it very often, but our semicircular canals are similar to those of the fish. Our eyes are similar. We have backbones and the fish grew little legs and came out of the sea and then developed into what we are today,” she explained.

“There are different theories about how that happened. My idea is that we have a memory of that somewhere in our unconscious. We remember that we come from the sea. It’s not a memory. It’s a feeling. It’s in our DNA. I think that’s where all these stories come from and our desire to go back to the sea, our desire to swim underwater.” (Lynk, 2024)

However, it is most powerful to hear Jonas read her words at 6:30 on the 53:59 podcast, link provided in the reference list below. There is power and conviction in her voice as if she is lifting her words up over the sounds of waves.

I find myself searching further into Jonas’ work in video and performance art. Her works are like having a conversation in the language of my inner most private self. Jonas uses memory, imagining, dream, her voice, her body and video together and exquisitely mapped out in layers within physical space using mirrors, installations, collaborations with musicians, performers, herself and the act of drawing or painting. These aspects are all present at once in a fractured whole of space and time which includes a viewer, possibly any viewer or at least no perfectly contextualised viewer.

There is something important for me here. I have yet to grasp what exactly. I know it might have to do with my observation and reference gathering practice. I am fascinated by how Jonas makes her process visible and part of what she presents in conversation with herself and others. There are fragments of continuation in her multimedia pieces that paint alone on a surface has difficulty communicating by itself. Has Jonas offered a way to see the length of my art practice as my art rather than just what is left behind with my body and mind on a painted surface? I am not sure but I want to ponder the possibility.

I share this note from my art journal so we can muse upon it during the weeks, months and years ahead. Did my exploration of Joan Jonas’ work have a lasting impact on my own or was it a fleeting fancy that drifted to the edges and was dismissed? Time will tell.

References:

Lynk, M. (2024) ‘We come from the sea’: American artist Joan Jonas on the pull of oceans and Cape Breton, CBC. Ideas in the Afternoon, Radio One. Available at: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/artist-joan-jonas-cape-breton-and-oceans-1.7358491(Accessed: 19 November 2024).

Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning (2024) The Museum of Modern Art. MoMA. Available at: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5367 (Accessed: 19 November 2024).

Jonas, J. (2023) Joan Jonas in ‘Fiction’ – Season 7 – ‘Art in the Twenty-First Century’ | Art21, YouTube. Available at: https://youtu.be/x2WkckhWRxw?si=NhphxzLbyAm498tq(Accessed: 19 November 2024

NEW SHOW IN THE TERRILL WELCH GALLERY POD

Join us for a remarkable artistic experience at the Terrill Welch Gallery Pod, located at 428 Luff Rd, Mayne Island, British Columbia, Canada. The gallery proudly presents the “Conversations with West Coast Landscapes" exhibition, showcasing the enchanting world paintings by renowned internationally collected artist Terrill Welch. This evocative exhibition opens on Monday, November 18, 2024, and will be available for walk-in self-browsing daily from 11 AM to 4 PM throughout the winter and early spring.

I enjoyed putting this show together after the riot of colour filling the walls with the past still life show. There are newer small works from over the past summer and some personal favourite arbutus tree and Salish Sea paintings that all say “west coast” to me.

HARDSHIP IS OFTEN CONTEXTUAL - a very short story

We had a bad storm early morning on Saturday, December 14th with winds gusting over 100 km per hour and lost power at 6:00 am. A tree came down about 8:00 am at the corner of Bowsprite Crescent and Luff Road, taking the power and internet lines with it. On Sunday morning we still didn’t have power and so I declared it a painting day for me and put up notices online that the Gallery Pod is closed until we have power again. Cones blocked the road so people didn’t drive over the downed lines. We were stuck behind the these lines with no way out or for anyone to get in without bushwhacking through the park behind us and coming in the back of our property. However we are fine and had everything we needed…

I charged my phone in the car this morning and now the iPad is charging. No BC Hydro crew yet but we truly are fine. I moved the fridge perishable to the cold entryway. The freezer will stay frozen solid for three days if it is kept closed.

So, let me tell you a story from our second candlelight morning…

David is more than a little grumpy this morning so I tell him a story about where he is delivering milk by horse in London in 1660 and he wakes early in his one room stone cottage by the stables to have bone broth and porridge cook by his daughter (because his wife died in childbirth) on a sod fireplace with a tallow candle for light. Both are so smoky he has a constant cough. After his breakfast, he must go out in the heavy rain in an oiled canvas slicker to make his deliveries.

Then I said - See! This is pretty good. We are doing great!

David replied - Don’t say that too loud.

I ask - why?

He responds without hesitation- People will think you are crazy… They would be right too!

But he is no longer grumpy 😂😂😂

HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND ALL THE BEST OF THE NEW YEAR!

Winter Solstice and the shortest day of the year is tomorrow. We are here! We made it to the beginning of the return of the light!

Sunrise December 6, 2024 at Reef Bay by Terrill Welch

I am looking forward to that steady increase in daylight hours over the months ahead. If you look closely at the image above, near the bottom middle, there is a clamshell floating on the water. It is balanced upright by a little stone perfectly place in its curve. I got even closer, letting my waterproof shoes sink into the soft sand and be covered by the sea. I take a couple of images but the light was so low that they are grainy. So I played with the best one in the BeCasso program until I got it the way I wanted it… or at least close.

Clamshell floating in the incoming tide at Reef Bay by Terrill Welch

I briefly muse if this might be how human’s living along the sea got an idea to make boats? I must admit, the moment was a bit magical and a lovely mystery, much like the kindness and caring that flows more easily during the holiday season.

On that note I wish you all the best and time with those you love in the warm of home and hearth during these final days of 2024 and the beginning of 2025!