Andrew and Laura McCain Art Gallery

Shadows and Tall Trees, Stephen Hutchings
2024-05-25 08:00 - 2024-07-06 17:00 (America/Halifax)
Opening 31 May, 2024 from 5-7 pm
Artist Stephen Hutchings will give a talk starting at 5:15 about his art practice and answer questions about the work in the gallery. Everyone is welcome, admission is always free and refreshments will be served.
Artist statement
My landscape paintings and drawings and prints are, in equal measures, both objective and subjective: they not only describe the world I know, but they also describe the world as I want it to be. I combine a resemblance to the external world we live in with the inner world of my emotions, my expectations and my hopes.
In my work, I engage with ideas about personal identity, mystery, revelation, and the infinite. Areas of rich dark are combined with areas of intense light, playing off of each other, acting as larger metaphors that refer to both ourselves, (as individuals and as part of a society) as well as to the world around us.
This exhibition brings together recent and new work representing a range of subjects, from trees to clouds, as well as extremes of sizes: Theatre of Trees is massive at 8’ x 40’ while the four Ghost Tree paintings are much more intimate at 12” x 12” each. Stephen Hutchings

Collections: Petit Mode and Sherman Jewellery
2024-04-06 - 2024-05-18
Opening Saturday April 6, 2-4pm.
Introductions at 2:30 by Clare McCain, Trudy Gallagher and Tracy Austin. Everyone is invited to drop by, admission is free and there is an elevator.
This exhibition brings together the art work of alumni and faculty from the fashion department of the New Brunswick College of Craft & Design and an exquisite private collection of costume jewellery by the mid-century Montreal designer, Gustave Sherman.
The Designers
Laura Macfarlane
Nightfall, 2023
Taffeta, cotton fabric for the vest, taffeta ribbon, chain, and buttons
Echo (Jing) Chen
Lonely Planet, 2023 Echo (Jing) Chen
Horsehair canvas, bemberg lining
Nicole Daigle
The Meadows Road, 2023
Silk brocade, cotton, velvet, kasha lining
Sherry Kinnear
Asymptomatic, 2023
Synthetic fabrics, leather, metal, paint, beads, sequins, thread, wire, human hair
Gustave Sherman
Gustave Sherman, Jewels of Elegance
“Costume” or “Fashion” Jewellery was popularised in the 18th century with the development of a hard lead glass called paste and marcasite, small cut pieces of faceted steel or pyrite set in silver, which became affordable alternatives to precious stones. By the mid 20th century, French designer Coco Chanel declared “that really elegant women were those who could mix together different jewellery, real and fake, suitable for each occasion … with the aim to complete an outfit.” This lent greater legitimacy to non-precious jewellery, with designers conceiving new styles, using new materials and discovering new possibilities with colour. Restrictions during WWII to certain metals changed the production of jewellery as much as it did fashion. Changing lifestyles for women, who were increasingly part of the workforce, the influence of Hollywood glamour and the weakening of European influences in general during the war years, led to the production of the first completely American look of dressy costume jewellery.
Between 1947 and 1982, Canada’s most renowned costume jeweller, Gustave Sherman, pioneered the manufacturing of high quality, Canadian made costume jewellery that rivalled the best being made at that time. Using the finest Swarovski crystals and later their beads and plating he became known for his sophisticated three dimensional designs, unexpected colour combinations, shape and style of crystal, and quality settings.
Sherman Jewellery has always been synonymous with quality. Sherman designed styles which were intricate and complex, full of contrasting lines, shapes and colour. His pieces required large numbers of crystals all of which were prong set by hand and the settings double plated. Another characteristic of Sherman design is the three-dimensionality achieved through his use of layers and domed structures. He offered a range of prices by creating different sized pieces and it isn’t uncommon to have one item from a set signed and the others left unsigned. The cuff bracelet was a unique Sherman design, there are three in Clare McCain’s collection, and they have always been the most desirable pieces.
One of the reasons he was so well known across Canada was because he sold his work through all the large department and luxury jewellery stores like Birks, Eatons and Peoples but also in jewellery stores in smaller centres across the country.
Gustave Sherman was a son of first-generation parents who fled Lithuania to escape persecution. Although he had no formal creative training, in 1947 he worked as a jewellery salesman, eventually opening Sherman Costume Jewellery in Outremont, Montreal. By the 1950s the company was thriving and Sherman was Canada’s most recognized costume jeweller.

New Brunswick Art Collecion 2023 Acquisitions
2024-03-02 08:00 - 2024-03-30 17:00 (America/Halifax)
Opening March 2, 2-4 pm
Formerly known as the New Brunswick Art Bank, and renamed Collection Art NB, the provincial art collection was started in 1968 and is a permanent collection of art by New Brunswick artists belonging to the province. There are currently 906 artworks by 395 artists and this exhibition features the most recent acquisitions purchased in 2023. If you’d like to browse the full collection, go to Collection ArtNB. Like other provincial collections, the art is shown in New Brunswick government buildings, offices, schools and other public buildings.
Twenty one artists from around the province are represented in the 2023 Acquisitions show.
Audrey Arsenault
Maryse Arsenault
Alanna Baird
Remi Belliveau
Jon Claytor
Nate Gaffney
Chelsea Gauvin
Mario LeBlanc
Fabiola Martinez
Annie France Noel
Maja Padrov
Roula Patheniou
Melanie Parent
Shane Perly-Dutcher
Jared Peters
Garry Sanipass
Ralph Simpson
Colin Smith
Dawn Steeves
Anna Torma
Janice Wright-Cheney
David Szako

Mountain of Wonder and Tangles of Truth: Kathy Hooper, a retrospective
2024-01-20 08:00 - 2024-02-24 17:00 (America/Halifax)
Kathy Hooper’s remarkable career spans six decades of curiosity and creation, and demonstrates what it means to confront our fear and our delight in equal measure. Leading by example, she bravely honours the fullness of life, including the winding pathways where life’s joy and distress intermingle. Across her prolific multi-disciplinary art practice, social and environmental activism, and in her personal life, she approaches the world with earnest integrity and wonder.
Hooper’s imprint on the New Brunswick arts ecosystem has been revolutionary. A highly acclaimed multidisciplinary artist, she has been awarded the province’s highest honours in the visual arts, and her work can be found in public and private collections around the world—she has eight works in the National Art Bank alone.
In art and activism she meaningfully delves into often-overlapping explorations of identity, feminism, multi-species entanglements, socio-political structures, climate crisis and violence. Unbound by any one media, Hooper moves fluidly between painting, clay sculpture and functional ceramics, various forms of printmaking, wood carving, embroidery, poetry and prose. She lives art; nurturing her incredible gardens, and enlivening her domestic spaces.
Yet, it is her ritual of drawing which propels her creative process. Often beginning with just a line, her drawings are largely unplanned and spark with immediacy. She refers to the powerful moment the artwork takes over, as though she becomes a conduit for creativity, rather than its author.
In an artist statement for a 1969 solo exhibition which toured the Atlantic provinces, Kathy Hooper wrote:
“I want to say how infinitely beautiful, how ugly, how funny, and how exciting the world is. I want to stretch as far, and dig as deep as I can. I want to say that there is nothing I know for sure except that — there is nothing I know for sure.” “I would love to reach the land and trees I love so much from where they are, not always from where I happen to be.”
Kathy Hooper, 1979
“Often we feel that we can impose on the landscape, but in fact we make very little impression in the end.”
“What happens behind the land, trees, and water we ‘see’ so easily? We don’t ‘see’ what is really there”
Kathy Hooper, 2010
“The special moments —when your best work happens— is when you allow the painting to take over. The painting becomes you.”

Kathy Hooper, Sept 13th 1995, Times Globe

Mel Hamilton: Reframing Perspectives
2023-10-21 - 2023-11-18
Opening celebration: Friday, 10 November 2023 5 – 7 pm.

Reframing Perspective is about creating work from an authentic female experience. My previous furniture work was informed by the male woodworking perspective shown in books exhibitions and other collections. I was taught that woven elements were used to add comfort. For this body of work I purposely looked to women for design inspiration and to reclaim the use of soft sculptural materials.
Over 100 years ago Annie Albers, Benita Otte, Gunta Stolzl and Otte Berger were weaving students at the Bauhaus in Germany. Their use of pattern, color and commitment to experimentation pave the way for Modern Art and Design. Works by these four artists directly inspired each piece in this series.
Weaving techniques and designs have been reimagined here in three-dimensional furniture pieces where the wood structures support the patterns and lines of soft material. These works illustrate the dynamic motion of a woven line and show that material can have both a physical and emotional weight.
Melanie Hamilton is an Atlantic Canadian craftsperson in visual artist. She specializes in finely crafted objects using solid wood and woven materials she studied at the center for furniture craftsmanship in Maine and Sheridan College in Ontario. She also holds a fine arts degree from Mount Allison University majoring in photography. Wooden leg Studio has been featured in such Publications as Home and Cabin, East Coast Living, Popular Woodworking and Canadian Woodworking.

Brigitte Clavette: The Mysterious Soul of Objects
2023-10-21 - 2023-11-18
Opening celebrations of The Mysterious Soul of Objects scheduled 10 November 2023, 5 – 7 pm

The artworks in The Mysterious Soul of Objects are from a series created over the past few years under the name of “futile abundance”. “I cast in sterling silver or bronze discarded foodstuff, found animal parts, and along with these I hammer or “raise” small vessel forms that I call skins. These become the palette or inventory that I use to create still lives or tableaux that invite the gourmand to the table. I am interested in the tension between attraction and repulsion. These platters or tableaux give a living space to the mysterious objects I create. Objects whose function is not always clear. Objects that invite the viewer for some kind of connection or communion. These objects may invite contemplation or curiosity”. Brigitte Clavette
Head of Jewellery and Metal Arts, and an instructor at the New Brunswick College of Art and Design from 1985 to 2017, Brigitte Clavette currently teaches part-time and devotes herself to her artistic practice. She is the 2022 winner of the Governor General Saidye Bronfman Award for excellence in fine crafts, and is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts. She received the Excellence Award and the Strathbutler Award from the Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation of New Brunswick in 2006. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, The Victoria & Albert Museum, London England, the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John as well as being included in the contemporary silversmithing collection of the Art Gallery of Guelph, Ontario

Truth & Reconciliation Day at the Gallery
2023-09-30 10:00 - 14:00 (America/Halifax) | Andrew & Laura McCain Art Gallery, 8 McCain Street, Florenceville-Bristol, New Brunswick, E7L 3H6, Canada
Join us on September 30th for National Day of Truth & Reconciliation at the Gallery. Starting at 10am we will be here to learn, experience, and become better allies to our Indigenous family. All are welcome with openness.

Napoigagenn: Brian Francis, Tara Francis, Starlit Simon
2023-09-16 10:30 - 2023-10-14 17:00 (America/Halifax)
Brian Francis
Author, Poet, Photographer, Director-Producer Brian Francis of Elsipogtog First Nation is painting his visions, dream images that come to him and he is compelled to embody them with paint. Well known as an international award winning filmmaker and musical entrepreneur, he has produced, directed and has written over 70 award winning documentaries. Most recently Brian released his first book, Between Two Worlds- Spiritual Writings and Photographs.
“I think my work in The Sacred Space goes beyond being Indigenous or non-Indigenous. It goes deeper into the heart of who
we all are as people. It goes beyond historical and political rhetoric, it isn’t about Indigenous rights or Native politics. My artwork serves
to unite ancient souls that dwell within all of us that oftentimes get bogged down by daily stresses of life, regardless of who we are as people. The ancestorial space that is occupied by the ones who were here before us ,It is up to us to acknowledge and honour them and it is where we must seek guidance whilst here in this plane. The Sacred Space is within our hearts a place we often forget to look when we seek answer. Perhaps the lesson in that may be that we may be afraid of what it is we will find when we look deep within the confines of our souls. But reality is , these are the answers we need.”
Tara Francis

“My work is a form of prayer, and it’s healing for me just in the very act of doing it,” says Tara Francis, a contemporary Mi’kmaw artist from the Elsipogtog First Nation, now based in Shediac, N.B.
“A youthful portrait taken from a black and white photo of my Maternal Grandmother Lucretia McLaughlin. This is one of two portraits I have created, the first being a portrait of my Paternal Grandmother Louise Francis. (which is now part of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery’s permanent collection) The stories of these women’s lives and the legacy of their dedication and nurturing kindness to their families and communities are truly an inspiration.
I grew up next door to my Granny Lucretia and it was her support and encouragement that led me to pursue a career in art. These portraits are part of a series entitled That Which has Shaped me. Made possible in part by a Creation Grant from ArtsNB.

Starlit Simon
Starlit Simon is Mi’kmaw from Elsipogtog First Nation and a full-time PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick in the Faculty of Education. She can often be found highway hunting for porcupine roadkill where she harvests the porcupine quills to create her art. “As I continue through the process of research and academia, I am often grappling with myself, my Indigenous world view, my Mi’kmaq language, and with the western world view and the English language. It often takes me a significant amount of time to operate and understand how to walk, work and communicate in the western world, because when I do, I abandon who I am at my core, a Mi’kmaq woman from Elsipogtog [The River of Fire]. This art piece is symbolic of that internal struggle that many Indigenous scholars can attest to also feeling, not just in their graduate studies but throughout their undergrads and in high schools as well. This piece is a reminder that there is a way to apply two eyed seeing as is the term that was in our language and world view from very long ago. Where you walk with one foot in both worlds. “, Starlit Simon.

Altered Land, paintings by Judith Berry
2023-07-27 08:00 - 2023-09-09 17:00 (America/Halifax)
Opening Thursday July 27, 5:30-7:30

Artist Statement

I consider these paintings to be landscapes, although the objects in them often appear more manufactured than organic. Each work employs an aspect of illusion, a reference to three-dimensional space. Yet, upon examination, the forms depicted seem to be composed of nothing other than paint itself, or perhaps a related material, such as modeling clay. Appearing tactile, elements of the paintings twist and transform, becoming buildings, targets, ropes, sticks, bubbles, and areas of flat colour. There is a sense of movement that challenges the weight and solidity of the objects depicted. Larger forms are often composed of a multitude of small, repeated elements, creating works that are both detailed and minimalist.
A few of the paintings in this show came from a recent experiment in which I made very small works, then used them as templates for larger paintings. This led me into new territory. While I was working on them, the small paintings hung next to the larger ones, creating a back-and-forth dialogue between the larger and smaller images. The small paintings function as identification cards, or explanations, for the larger ones. I am presenting these pairs as asymmetrical diptychs to create a slightly humorous relationship between the pieces, inviting comparison and scrutiny.
The paintings also contain references to portraits and still lives. Many of the forms depicted are ambiguous, both in reference and in scale. A vegetal form might represent a tree, a plant, a gesture in paint, or a small part of someone’s face. For me, this preoccupation with shifting
scale is parallel to the experience of life, in which our routines and surroundings may be relatively simple, but they cannot be disentangled from the larger picture of climate crisis, inequality, and disintegrating social structure.
The themes visited in this show stem from a desire to extend the vocabulary of my painting while forming a metaphor for the chaos of contemporary life. Along with an inevitable blend of my daily perceptions and preoccupations, the works contain a contemplation of the larger period in which I paint. It is my hope that, when looking at the paintings, the viewer retains a sense of both scales, of our intimate lives against the macrocosm of our times.

Biography
Judith Berry lives and works in Montreal. She studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax and spent one year in the Studio Program at the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts. She has had solo exhibitions across Canada in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Ottawa. Judith has also shown in numerous group exhibitions including exhibitions at the Musée du Québec and the Canada Science and Technology Museum. Her work is in various collections including: the City of Ottawa, the Musée du Québec and the Art Bank of the Canada Council. She has served as a jury member for the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the City of Ottawa. She is represented by Galerie Art Mûr in Montreal.
Judith Berry, Hand to Hand, 2022

Tell me a Story: Five Acadian Artists
2023-06-03 10:30 - 2023-07-22 17:00 (America/Halifax) | Andrew & Laura McCain Art Gallery, 8 McCain Street, Florenceville-Bristol, New Brunswick, E7L 3H6, Canada
The Andrew & Laura McCain Art Gallery is full of spring colour and summer joy this month as the exhibition of five renowned and celebrated Acadian artists – one sculptor and four painters – share their art with our community. The art works are on loan to the gallery through their art dealer, Daniel Chaisson, of the gallery ART/ARTIST in Dieppe. From the playful descriptions of life on the Acadian shore in the work of Yvon Gallant, to the vibrant dynamism of the palette knife abstractions by Louise LeBlanc, stories abound in the art of these five artists. Together their narratives explore and describe humorous moments, acknowledge history, ephemeral states, balancing acts and decisive moments. The power and impact of colour, textures and gesture are vital means of expression for the artists, whether they are investigating their world, their imagination or their process. The only sculptor in the show, Marie Hélène Allain,most famous for her monumental stone works, is presenting six sculptures from a series of 35, that are assembled from rock, alder wood, copper and bronze. Tall, figure-like constructions, acknowledge the history of the alder tree in the development of Acadian society while talking about her faith and the place of the individual in community.
6.G.Goguen_Fond_orange_ligne_bleueGeorge Goguen Louise LeBlanc, Cndn, UP_TIMIST, Sans titre #1, 2020, oil on canvas11.Y.Gallant_Drapeaux_en_berne2.M.Parent_Ce_long_voyage_a_l’interieur17.M.H.Allain_Altruisme

Other Worlds
2023-03-25 - 2023-04-22
Jean-Paul Riopelle, Works on paper
The exhibition Other Worlds brings together two bodies of work from the Beaverbrook Art Gallery’s permanent collection. Five landscapes fill the west gallery with one work each by Canadian artists Miller Gore Brittain, Carol Fraser, William Goodridge Roberts, Robin Collyer, and John Hartman. The five landscapes – four paintings and one photograph – demonstrate the expressive potential of landscape subjects, referencing natural cycles, renewal and growth, and pointing to aspects of the relationship we have with nature. Disparate in style and medium, the five landscapes in the exhibition share an impulse to reimagine the natural world rather than mirror it.
A collection of works on paper by Quebec artist Jean Paul Riopelle fill the east gallery. Riopelle emerged in the 1940s as an artist interested in expressions of an inner reality and the language of abstraction. The works in the BAG collection are mostly from later in his life and some of these images may have been Inspired by the large flocks of snow geese that landed annually in the Bas St. Laurent region where he settled after returning to Quebec.
While contrasting in approach, the landscapes and Riopelle share strong formal antecedents and all of the artists explore varying degrees of abstraction, conceptually and figuratively. In 1952 the American critic Rosenberg called an empty canvas “an arena in which to act..what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event”, articulating a significant break with history in ceasing to regard the surface as a support for a picture, but to see it as a record of an action or an event. The leap Rosenberg articulated is manifested here between William Goodridge Roberts Field in Summer and Riopelle’s prints across the room.
Born in 1923 in Montreal, Jean Paul Riopelle became an artist in post WWII Quebec, and under the influence of Paul Emile Borduas, rejected the traditional representational language of painting in favour of an internal and emotive form of expression. He and a group of seven painters calling themselves Les Automatistes, rejected not only representation in painting, but also the French Modern traditions of Picasso and Matisse in pursuit of a unique abstract art embracing unconscious spontaneous expression. Continuing to push the limits and conventions of their art, Les Automatistes were vocal in their struggle against the socially repressive and authoritarian Quebec society upheld by then Premier Duplessis and the Catholic Church. Idealist social theories, psychoanalysis, and in particular surrealism inspired Riopelle to find in abstraction a means to liberate his art from the socially oppressive culture of the time.The first exhibition of abstract art in Canada was held by Les Automatistes in Montreal in 1946.
Struggling in such a restrictive environment, Les Automatistes eventually all signed the manifesto Refus Global, written by Paul Emile Borduas, that condemned the stranglehold over individual freedom, called for the liberation of the individual and helped launch the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. The manifesto caused many artists great hardship and with a resistance to abstraction evident in Canada, Riopelle soon left to live and work in Paris.
Riopelle spent many years in Paris and Giverny, a respected artist who developed an international career. Riopelle’s works on paper in this collection that date from the 1980s, were created after his return to Canada. While some have strong representational references, many do not. With no centre of interest, no representation of the real world they layer gestures, movement, marks and colour, reflecting the artist’s subconscious in unexpected juxtapositions and reveal a few of the methods Riopelle developed to liberate his imagination. He died in Quebec in 2002.
Five Landscapes from the Beaverbrook Collection

The Sketchbooks of Tom Forrestall
2023-02-04 - 2023-03-11
The Tom Forrestall sketchbook collection offers a unique insight into an artist’s working life, a visual and written diary spanning a creative lifetime. The collection now approaching 400 volumes covers over 70 years of the artist’s creative explorations and development. As a daily creative record of observation, reflection and exploration it documents the passions and interests of an observant and creative individual who doodles, sketches and details the people, animals, ideas and places he visits, both literally and imaginatively. Everyday few days the pages of his sketchbooks will be turned so there will be new images to see each time you drop in between now and March 11.
Tom Forrestall Bio.
Thomas DeVany Forrestall, C.M., O.N.S., B.F.A. LL.D., RCA is one of Canada’s leading realist artists. He was born in Middleton Nova Scotia, in 1936. In 1954, Forrestall was awarded a scholarship to the Fine Arts department at Mount Allison University, where he studied with Lawren P. Harris, Ted Pulford and Alex Colville. Graduating in 1958 he received one of the first Canada Council grants for independent study which provided him with the opportunity to travel throughout Europe. Upon their return to Canada they moved to New Brunswick where Tom became assistant curator of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. He has been a full time artist since 1960. His artwork has been exhibited internationally and is held in major public collection in Canada.

the gallery as a studio
2023-02-04 - 2023-03-11
Until March 11, eight artists are effectively turning the gallery into a drawing studio. There is something new to see everyday as the artists make decisions, change directions and make progress on their art.
The Closing Celebration will be held March 11, 2023, from 2-4 pm with as many artists present as can make it.
Artists schedules: Vicky Lentz and Francine Martin will be in the gallery most Wednesdays and Fridays until mid-afternoon. Nick Walsh will be here February 2nd, 9th, 16th and most likely the 24th. Stephen Hutchings will be here midday many days, as will Colin Smith. Jennifer Stead is always here, occasionally drawing but always happy to say hi. Amanda Balestreri will be here February 17 and 18.
Nick Walsh is an emerging illustrator from Fredericton, NB. Nick loves exploring the magic hidden in the forests and his work dives deep into the mystical, spiritual, and cultural myths of the natural world around us. His aim is to rekindle the imagination by weaving strange stories into his surreal art pieces that remind us of our role in mother nature's cosmic wheel.
Colin Smith draws constantly, doodles on paper, in books, over shopping lists and has done it since grade one. The landscape is a living, moving entity, a series of slow undulations, studded with trees and potato fields.
Vicky Lentz's practice is exploratory and diverse as she move between materials, mediums and processes. In her art ideas, images, materials are always reconfigured through the process of art making, transformed during creation to be records of the creative experience.
Stephen Hutchings is working on a future exhibition and "Fallen Tree" is a study for a large painting in the series “Theatre of Trees”. The final painting, of which this is a to-scale drawing, will be approximately 8’ high and 40’ across.

Amanda Balestreri enjoys incorporating nature into all of her work. She is interested in observing how humans interact with nature and how our actions have been affecting the natural world over time. Sometimes her work can be a serious commentary or satire on where we may be heading if we continue to disrespect nature.
Amanda will be drawing at the gallery starting Saturday Feb 18. The 18th will be the only day to visit her as she is working through the family day weekend. Drop in tomorrow to say hi.
William Forrestall's subject is time and in his art he preserves moments by painting the shapes and textures of objects that interest him in that most basic of compositions: the still life. In his practice drawing is a means and a place to work out ideas for a future or concurrent painting.
Jennifer Stead drew the first of a series of long drawings, called "Meander" in 2007. 100' long, it is a landscape of the Canadian Rockies where she lived at the time. In this drawing she is working from memory and responding to all the landscapes she has cultivated and observed from many parts of the country.
Francine Martin is a painter from a small community in northwest New Brunswick. Known for her use of Chiaroscuro, a technique that has a strong contrast between lights and darks. Her still lifes and landscapes have been shown all over the St-John Valley in New Brunswick in auctions, festivals, group and solo shows. In 2018 she had a solo show at ALMAG.

Shared Shots: A Community Photography Show
2022-09-03 - 2022-10-01
The Opening will be on Saturday September 3, 2022 from 2 – 4 pm
Introductions at 2:30
All welcome

Made possible through the generous support of the

Printers Inc.
2022-05-28 - 2022-07-09
An exhibition featuring prints by Amy Ash, Alanna Baird, Nathan Cann, Ryan Livingstone, Ann Manuel and Bob Morouney of Sunbury Shores Arts and Nature Centre.

Closing November 8, 2022: Call for Exhibition Proposals for 2023-2024 seasons
2022-04-30 08:00 - 2022-11-08 17:00 (America/Halifax)
Update: Thank you for your submissions. The Selection Committee has been delayed. We will be in contact after selections have been made.
Contemporary professional artists and curators with a proposal are invited to apply.
https://mccainartgallery.com/artists/

Frank Allison: Paintings and Drawings
2022-04-23 - 2022-05-21
Born in Saint John, N.B., Frank Allison (1883-1951) studied painting under Wilfred Molson Barnes and Maurice Galbraith Cullen at the Art Association in Montreal; John F. Carlson, Woodstock, New York; George Elmer Browne in Europe. He worked for the Bank of Montreal in Saint John, and by 1906 had transferred to Ontario and Montreal. He traveled extensively and found his subjects in many countries. Toward the end of WWI, he was working for the Bank in London England and was closely associated with Canadian painter James Wilson Morrice. Although he painted a variety of subjects, he had a special interest in architecture and is perhaps best known for his watercolours.
Peter Larocque, Curator at the New Brunswick Museum has observed that Allison is remembered for his impressionist-inspired landscapes filled with light, mood and atmosphere, and his accomplished watercolours, which show his technical mastery of this very demanding medium.
Watercolour painting has always been appreciated by artists for its portability and in the 19th century in Europe, when landscape subjects were favoured by many artists, art exhibitions displayed comparable numbers of watercolours and oils. However, by the turn of the 20th century, this ratio changed so that the number of watercolours submitted for exhibitions declined rapidly. In 1925 when the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour formed, the medium received renewed interest, regaining some of the stature it had lost.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the Canadian art scene in central Canada was focused on the Group of Seven and the idea of a unique “Canadian” art. The Maritimes, however, held strong ties to New England and Great Britain, and so it was within this tradition that Allison found himself.
Allison exhibited with the Royal Canadian Academy exhibitions between 1915 and 1941; at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Spring Shows between 1915 and 1939 and was a life member of the American Water Colour Society. Among his solo shows during his career was one for his watercolours at the T. Eaton Company Gallery in Montreal in November of 1933 when The Montreal Star critic noted, “Mr. Allison’s subjects are principally the streets and buildings of old towns and, more particularly, towns in the south of Europe. The pictures are mostly large watercolours, painted with much breadth and freedom, full of the gay colour and sunlight of places in Spain, Italy, southern France and Morocco.”
Allison’s art is represented in the collections of Mount Allison University, Sackville, N.B.; Y.W.C.A., Saint John, N.B.; New Brunswick Museum, Saint John; City of Saint John, N.B.; Milliken University, Decatur, IL.; Decatur Inst. of Civic Art; Art Inst., Springfield, IL.; and many private collections. His niece, Mrs. Doreen (Allison) Tuomola of Toronto has kindly loaned her collection for this exhibition.

With the Grain: Carving Students' Show
2022-04-23 - 2022-05-21
Marty by Max Hutchison
James Buxton has been teaching carving classes at the River Art Centre for many years. His students have created many beautiful works that we look forward to sharing with you.
Featured carvers include: Lloyd Borowski, Paul Dean, Arline Gordon, Wendy Hall, Susanne Hansen, Max Hutchison, Roseanne Hutchison, Bessie Nicholson Langille, Mark McCauley, Judy McGuire, Scott O’Brien, and Rudy Stocek
Opening
Saturday, April 23
2-4 pm
Introductions at 2:30 pm

Alanna Baird
2022-02-05 - 2022-04-16
Radial SymmetriesThis work revolves around the Pentaradial symmetry of a Sea Urchin shell. Pentaradial being a five sectioned symmetry found in nature that revolves around a central point. The simplest example being the Starfish and its five legs. Alanna Baird has been exploring this patterning through several different mediums and dimensions. The printmaking is often her initial exploration in surface patterns.
Thanks to funding through ArtsNB, I was able to create a body of work in lost wax cast bronze. Using some of my own ceramic work from the 1990’s as forms, I cast wax into these shapes and then altered the wax by cutting holes; exploring the symmetry as well as the strength of this new-to-me material. The bronze was cast in a foundry in Quebec, but the chasing (grinding of sprues and polishing of surface metal) and patination (colour) completed in Alanna’s studio.
The Calligraphic sculpture in plastic represents a second ArtsNB grant funded project. The initial intent was to use 3D printing to change the scale of my work. Computer design is not something I enjoy, the hands on fabrication of things is what I love. I became fascinated with a hand held 3D pen, and the clear plastic it could extrude. Light and air flowing through this new body of work, shadows cast. Although the plastic in the exhibition is too fragile to sell, I intend to work farther in this technique.
I am inspired by what I find on my daily walks on the sea floor, the inter tidal zone of the Bay of Fundy reveals it’s treasure to me. Treasure to me is not gold coins, but rather glimpses of things that catch my eye. Part historical – pipe stems, china shards, even stone weapons of a very early age, and part natural environment – resident as well as invasive species included. Often fragments, shells with their interiors exposed, sea urchin shell pieces which reveal the complexity of their “construction”.
I am a materials based artist. I enjoy exploring the material I have to work with. Mastering techniques, learning how to work with it, what it’s limits are, figuring out what I can do with it. I often work with recycled materials. Invasive species like the Lionfish have entered my view. I am currently working on a printmaking project involving the Golden Star Tunicate, an invasive species along this coastline. – Alanna Baird
Curated by Brigitte Clavette and Jennifer Stead.
Meet Alanna
Saturday, April 16, 2-4 pm at the Gallery

Irene Tompkins: Bouquets and flowers
2021-10-09 - 2021-11-13
A celebration of watercolour paintings by Carleton County artist Irene Tompkins.

Currents
2021-08-28 - 2021-10-02
Deanna Musgrave and Amy Ash
The energy that passes through or between us, the memory of water, a pulse, a charge, a conduit, a body in motion, a cycle.
Currents links the recent work of Amy Ash and Deanna Musgrave through their shared interest in the poetics of water, memory and the unseen. Quiet explorations of biofields, sensation, and connection resonate from the works that comprise Currents. Watermarks and brushstrokes become tidelines, evidence of time and transformation brought on by an interaction of forces.
Through conduits of both representational form and abstract composition the artists encourage reflection, interaction, and personal change. Both Ash and Musgrave work fluidly between dedicated studio practices and social engagement. While Ash creates opportunities for collaboration and shared meaning-making as an act of collective care, Musgrave works with individuals through energy healing techniques.
Together, through diverse embodied methodologies, Ash and Musgrave hold space for connection, reparation, and transformation.
Amy Ash
Amy Ash is an interdisciplinary artist engaged with collective care through processes of shared meaning-making. Her practice flows from curatorial projects and writing to teach-ing, socially engaged action, and hands-on making. Blurring the lines between disciplines, they trace connectivity through the intersections and overlaps between memory, learning, and wonder, to incite curiosity. Amy has exhibited and curated programmes internationally, with projects commissioned by National Gallery London (UK), The NB International Sculpture Symposium (NB), Beaverbrook Art Gallery (NB), and Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts (MB). She is an instructor with the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design, writes regularly for CreatedHere Magazine, Visual Arts News, and is a member of the International Associ-ation of Art Critics. Amy lives in Menahqesk/Menagoesg/Saint John, New Brunswick, with her wife Alex, along with their dog and cat. Of settler ancestry, they are a grateful guest on the unsurren-dered and unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik, Mi’kmaq, and Peskotomuhkati peoples. www.amyash.ca @amy_ash_ Pronouns: She/They can be used interchangeably. I have no preference.
Deanna Musgrave
“Musgrave’s work has been a fixture in the Saint John and New Brunswick art community for over a decade. Her paintings are immediately recognizable; ethereal and vibrant, they encapsulate traits that many artists struggle to balance. They are objectively beautiful yet wrought with complex symbolism and capture a narrative while remaining vehemently abstract.” ~Christiana Myers, “Peer Review: The Best Art of 2018,” The East, December 2018

Deanna Musgrave is best known for her large-scale public artwork such as, “Cloud” (2015) and “Tropos” (2019) whichare both over 40’ wide and part of the collection of the University of New Brunswick. Her works inspire contemplation and are a response to her endless seeking of the unseen, metaphysical and mysterious.
Early on in her career, she was selected by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in 2007 for the Studio Watch Award which aimed at introducing promising new artists to the public and later included in “Off the Grid: Abstract Art in New Brunswick” at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in 2014. Her work has been enthusiastically reviewed by the New Brunswick media, and she has won numerous grants and awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, New Brunswick Arts Board, Mount Allison University and the University of New Brunswick. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Mount Allison University (2005) and a Master of Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of New Brunswick (2019). Outside of her artmaking, she works in guidance through hypnosis, energy clearing and other mysterious practices to assist. She is based out of Menagoesg (Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada).
Artist Statement – Deanna Musgrave“For visual artist Deanna Musgrave, art and healing are interwoven. This is why, transformation is the crux of her work and the reason she found home in Saint John, [New Brunswick], a historic working-class city on the Bay of Fundy. This place possesses energy she describes as having “an ancient quality that brings together polarity.” It is polarities that inhabit Deanna’s vision. Her work is an interaction that seeks unity, exuding energy in the process, much like the current transformative renaissance happening here in the old port city.” (1)
“[Her] work has been a fixture in the Saint John and New Brunswick art community for over a decade. Her paintings are immediately recognizable; ethereal and vibrant, they encapsulate traits that many artists struggle to balance. They are objectively beautiful yet wrought with complex symbolism and capture a narrative while remaining vehemently abstract.” (2)
“Often working on the studio floor, using liquid paints to surround, unify and pool around areas of information, Musgrave succeeds in defying a traditional concept of perspective. Her compositions unfold almost three-dimensionally, enveloping the viewer with information from above, straight on and below.” (3)
“Water is the starting point for each of Musgrave’s works. With a blank canvas placed on the floor of her studio, she selects objects of significance: of sentimental, aesthetic, or symbolic meaning, to place on top of the canvas. She sprinkles, sprays, or pours water over the object to capture an impression of the form in pigment. The impression made by the water is like a memory of the object on the canvas.
Using water in the process is as important to Deanna as her subject matter. Her world view is closely tied to the power of water and its relationship to experience and memory. Deanna’s work considers and articulates the theories of homeopathy: the ability of water to remember substances once mixed in it; cymatics: the patterns formed when a substance like water or sand is vibrated; and akashic field theory: the theory that information can exist and be transmitted through energy fields.
The result is a highly dynamic and fluid expression of memory, story, and a deep connection to water. Outside of her art, Deanna studies and practices dowsing: practiced since the 15th century to locate underground water systems. More recently dowsing has been adapted to locate areas of stress or trauma on the human body as a means of healing.”
All aspects of Deanna’s connection to water speak to a single idea: that information, knowledge, and experience can exist and be transmitted in many different ways. She believes that revolution can be ignited from person to person and that can happen in many different forms.” (4)

~Shannon Webb-Campbell, “Arts Higher State: The Vision and Practice of Deanna Musgrave, Created Here Magazine: Psyche, Volume 11, 2020.
~Christiana Myers, “Peer Review: The Best Art of 2018,” The East, December 2018
~Stephanie Buhmann, “New Brunswick Studio Conversations,” Billie Magazine V.2, Spring 2017
~Donna Wawzonek, “Deanna Musgrave: Stirring Large Conversations with Grande Impressions,” National Water Centre Blog

Artist Statement – Amy AshMemoryscape I, 2021:
Sometimes the important places in our lives can define us as much as the people with whom we find kinship. As much as we inhabit places, so do they hold a special spot, a resonance, within us. Specific landscapes, eco-systems, architecture, or townships can feel like a visceral extension of ones self. The attachment could be micro, macro, sensorial, drenched in memory, or exist within a dream—maybe you’ve been there a hundred times, maybe you have yet to visit.
Many thanks to those community members who heeded the call, contributed a photograph that helped Amy Ash build the collage included in this exhibition.
“The series Mettle uses copper as both a key material in the work and allegory—its material qualities becoming symbolic of resilience. Copper is a super-conductor of electricity, and the stan-dard by which all other conductivity is measured. Within my practice it has become a conductor of meaning. Copper is a memory shape alloy. It will always ‘remember’ its orig-inal form, and, when pressurized, will invariably revert to its original shape. Copper is also within our biological make-up, closely linked to memory dysfunction. When threatened by the elements, copper will produce a patina, or verdigris. This greenish tarnish acts as a weather buffer to preserve the integrity of the copper below its surface—an exquisite cop-ing mechanism. By adding copper sulphate crystals both to the metal’s surface and the paint’s pigment, the crystals continue to grow and morph as they respond to the climate, a metaphor for personal transformation brought on by external forces.” Amy Ash
“Touching Visions is an exploration of the body as an archive of sensation, experience, and action. The work is created through repetitive labour-intensive and experiential means, such as stitching, documenting performative actions, recording my body in plaster and my voice in looped improvised song. It marks the first time I have used my own image in my work.” Amy Ash

Isolated // Together
2021-07-24 - 2021-08-21
Curated by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, fourteen New Brunswick artists have designed wearable facemasks as part of the project, Isolated // Together, commemorating the cultural impact of masks during this pandemic.

Barbara Safran de Niverville
2021-07-10 - 2021-08-21
Vanitas by the Sea / Vanitas par la merBarbara Safran de Niverville explores the vigour of growth where native plants and garden escapees mingle. Discarded domestic objects punctuate intricate vegetation that seems to hover in the dark ground. The title of the exhibition references the still life genre of painting popular during the Baroque period in western art history. Vanitas portray highly realistic, symbolic objects such as flowers, porcelain and silver dishes, fruits and vegetables. Together on a tabletop, the objects are a reminder to the viewer of the hubris of mankind and the inevitability of mortality. Barbara has reinterpreted this point of view recognizing in her work the subtle influence of the present pandemic and its parallels to the plagues in Europe during 17th and 18th centuries. She has chosen to include objects in her work that are worn with use, but seem to possess an aura of their past significance while the shadow land they now inhabit evokes the mysterious resilience of the uncultivated growth found between a beach and a forest – abandoned land that survives in spite of humanity’s seeming indifference.
“Using a combination of natural and synthetic materials, my mixed-media panels represent a metaphor for the hybrid quality of the natural world. I question our concept of wilderness and reveal the flux between Nature and Culture and the tension between growth and decline. My current work explores outcast and forgotten areas of landscape that retain traces of human use. Essential to my process is experimentation, through digital photography, drawing, and the testing of new combinations of art techniques with industrial products”.
Vanitas Vivace is a short experimental video based on the painting Vanitas Chicory, on exhibit with this series. Elements from the painting leave the panel’s surface, become air born and dance to an original soundtrack. Barbara’s husband Peter de Niverville animated the film with music composed by their daughter, Abigail de Niverville. It is available to be viewed on Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/568608152/bb5d5ef7f8
A Prix Éloize finalist in 2018, Barbara has exhibited landscapes across Canada in twenty-six solo shows and numerous group projects in the United States and Iceland. In 2014, she completed her Masters of Fine Arts degree at the Art Institute of Boston.

Naturalis | Renata Britez
2021-06-26 10:30 - 2021-07-17 17:00 UTC
Renata Britez is a multidisciplinary emerging Canadian artist, originally from Brazil, who is currently based in Fredericton, NB. In 2020, she completed a degree in the NBCCD Textile Design Program and first brought her work to the Andrew & Laura McCain Art Gallery at Small Works 2018.
Naturalis demonstrates the diversity of her practice, her commitment to traditional techniques, ethics and sustainability in her production of materials as well as her artistic interest in working in both two and three dimensions. Subtle stories of her journeys in both art and life are paralleled in the mythic journeys and states she evokes though her sculptures and wearable art. Mothers, daughters, strife, survival, and conquest hint at the personal journey the artist embarked upon when she moved to Canada in 2014.
Persephone, a stylish garment of felted silk and wool, dyed the passionate red of Brazilwood, presents a sculpted and embroidered garden. Presented in a wearable form thick enough to warm and protect while referencing a myth of seasonal renewal and a mother-daughter story of compromise and lives lived at a distance.
Marked, two wall hangings whose subtle quilting describes the topography and streets of Fredericton, are coloured by detritus the artist collected on the ground. The works are re-presented acts of discovery, investigation and agency while making the reality of one’s choices “leaving its mark” tangible.
Marks and the act of mark making is evident throughout the art in the exhibition as is the colour palette, derived as it is from the actual colours of New Brunswick. Renata’s artistic training began here, and it appears that a key collaborator and muse has been the province of New Brunswick. Sourcing and creating natural dyes and paints for all that she creates, Renata starts each project literally at ground level.
Artist in Residence
Between June 14 and 26, 2021 Renata has been in Florenceville-Bristol for a residency at the River Art Centre to further her project called Maritime Colours (supported by a grant from ArtsNB). For this project Renata is researching, cataloging, and mapping pigments from plants and minerals found in the Atlantic Provinces of Canada. Supported by the New Brunswick Arts Board and the Andrew & Laura McCain Art Gallery Artist in Residence Programme, she is working on a series of paintings using natural pigments that are foraged and processed in Carleton County.
This programme is supported by the Carleton North Community Foundation.

Kathy Tidswell
2021-05-15 10:30 - 2021-06-19 17:00 UTC
Colours of NatureKathy Tidswell has a long career of working with textiles in a variety of creative ways. Her materials include paint and dye, machine stitching, as well as cloth that is found or created. The artist identifies two areas of exploration in the artwork included in the exhibition: Wall Quilts and Thread Stitching. In both bodies of work, the artist continually turns to Nature for inspiration.
“I strive to recreate nature’s beauty realistically in my work. Often inspired by my own photographs, I use hand painted and commercial fabric to create a wall quilt or paint a scene on fabric and bring it to life using thread, working with a domestic sewing machine. The needle becomes my paintbrush as I move the fabric freely. While my artistic medium is primarily thread, my painted fabric backgrounds support the production of landscapes and life-like three dimensional images of birds, wildlife and portraits. My wish is to transport the viewer to a unique place, whether it is a forest stand, a beach delivering the glories of a morning sunrise, or a backyard hosting our joyous songbirds.
Trees are special to me and have always featured very much in my work. Perhaps I have been influenced by my years working for the Canadian Forestry Service or perhaps it is my love of texture and dimension. Whatever is the case, trees have offered me many inspirations.” Kathy Tidswell

Owen Munisamy
2021-05-15 - 2021-07-03
Theme & VariationsThe exhibition includes watercolour and acrylic paintings created between 2016 and 2021. Born in a musical family in Liège, Belgium in 1987, Owen pursued his art studies in England where he obtained his BA (Honours) in Fine Art in 2011 from Winchester School of Art, Southampton University. In 2018 Owen and his family settled in Edmundston, NB.
“During my university studies, the professor suggested to us that we should seek inspiration from our homes, our family backgrounds and our surroundings. Coming from a musical family it was thus quite normal that I should look to music, especially to the sculptural forms of wood and brass instruments and their intricate mechanisms. My first years of painting were thus spent researching and gradually creating an enigmatic musical world with biomorphic forms of musical instruments [blended] with human elements [to create] a universe of extremely rich and varied forms which are organic and alive.”
Featured in the most recent edition of Created Here Magazine, Munisamy explores a form of abstraction that blends biological, suggestively human elements (which might remind you of the sculptures of British artists Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth) with the geometrical, hard-edged shapes of contemporary technology. In vivid and bold colour, Munisamy creates variations on a theme of collapsing and exploding spheres suspended on illusory planes, within expansive atmospheres and accompanied with surprising allusions to both art and the real world. At any point the artist’s imagery can transport us to the microscopic or to outer space. Another influence on the artist was Salvador Dali and if you can remember his famous melting clock, you are well on your way to envisioning Munisamy’s biomorphic inventions. Tree trunks, bicycle wheels, telescopes, lines, wedges, and the unexpected biological form can all be discovered in these enigmatic paintings
Owen’s diverse interests and influences include cartooning, Metaphysical and Surrealist painting. Bold colour contrasts, strong diagonals and areas of complexity contrasting with passages of delicate colour and light result in images that fuse technology with the human form.
“Likewise I have always been attracted to strip cartoons by the artists Enki Bilal (for his sombre atmospheres), Jean Giraud / Moebius (for his imagination and details) and Phillippe Druillet (for his dark backgrounds and very contrasting colours). Aldo Pomodoro and Anish Kapoor also inspired me, the first by his spheres with a complexity of details reflecting another world, the second by his voids that pull the viewer towards the interior. As de Chirico says: “Even that dreams are an inexplicable mystery but even more mysterious are the thoughts that converge to certain objects and aspects of life.
In parallel with my oil paintings I use watercolours. I employed that technique to start with as a means of research for my oil paintings. My watercolours are a long search from complex structures to now more delicate and sensitive paintings. My works are progressively becoming more architectural with fewer musical details. I am always engaged in creative research, always going forward, always evolving ….”

Out of the Woods:James Buxton,Francine Simard Levesque, Colin Smith
2021-03-27 - 2021-05-08
Out of the Woods brings together three carvers from northern New Brunswick who are inspired by nature and share a love of working with wood on a small scale. Their divergent intentions for their work reinforced by their stylistic choices confirm their individual voices despite their common materials and tools.
James Buxton
Born and raised in Riverbank, James has been sculpting all his life and has been carving for over 30 years. A self-taught carver James also works in steel, stone, and assemblage. Working out of the River Art Centre Studios, James also regularly teaches a variety of classes.
“I can’t stop making art – always have – and carving, working in 3 dimensions has always interested me. I am also a keen observer of nature and the habits and characteristics of birds. Carving the birds starts with selecting the right shaped block of wood, and carefully forming the body by paying very close attention to the unique characteristics of each species. Looking closely at the shapes inside the animal’s form, like the swell of the beak, tilt of the head, the pattern, shape and layers of feathers and all the other distinguishing characteristics that each bird has, I try to capture the natural stance of the bird. In the final colour, I strive for as great a verisimilitude as possible. Flock, 2020, on loan from the Public Art Collection of the Town of Florenceville-Bristol, is a collection of birds that are common to the Upper Saint John River Valley”. James Buxton
Artist James Buxton making Ash Baskets
“I love to work with my hands – can’t keep them still or stay in one place unless I am working on an art piece. I like to think that I am plagiarizing nature with my birds. Making them real”.
Francine Simard Levesque
Francine Simard Levesque is a self taught artist, born and raised in the northwestern part of New Brunswick. At a young age she was surrounded by artistic people who encouraged her to explore in every artistic discipline presented to her. Francine started to create with wood in 1985 and now concentrates on sculpture only.
“It is creating with the beauty of wood that makes me want to be an artist. When I find a piece of wood, I have no control over what I see. It is the spirit of the forest, of the trees that speak to me and that show me the human faces and animals I make. I try to keep that spirit alive in the sculpture. Every piece I make shares the forest spirit and carries the message “Keep the trees alive”, for the animals and for us.”
“The forest is a visualization of my feelings when in the solitude of the trees. It is the softness of the air and the smell of the leaves. It is the coarseness of the bark and the sounds of the animals. I feel it all. I am part of the forest and it is part of me.” Francine Simard Levesque
Francine at work in her studio
“En réalité, c’était la sculpture qui m’attirait. J’ai grandi à Edmundston et lorsque je me rendais à la cathédrale de l’Immaculée-Conception, j’étais fascinée par les sculptures et les détails. Je trouvais ça impressionnant. Lorsque j’ai appris qu’il y avait un groupe de sculpture à Grand-Sault, je me disais que j’irais rencontrer ces gens pour avoir des outils et je me suis mise à sculpter avec eux.”
Colin Smith
Colin Smith taught high school art, theatre, and English for 20 years. His work has been exhibited in galleries throughout NB and is included in public and private collections. For 11 years, his drawings and cartoons were featured weekly in the Salon section of the Telegraph Journal. He works out of his studio in the River Art Centre in downtown Florenceville-Bristol.
“I have always drawn. Several years ago, I decided my drawings did not look solid enough on the paper. So, I started carving, to figure out how to give my drawings a sense of weight. And it worked. It showed me some stuff about drawing, by making me look at it differently, and I grew to really enjoy carving.”
I work small. The shape of the wood generally determines what’s carved. Some of my whittlings look like residue from my distant ancestors. Some of them look a bit more modern. They are worked with knives, chisels, and axes, in a very unsophisticated way. I have found that every cut changes my idea of the project. I may start out with an idea, but the wood itself, by breaking and revealing its shapes and curls , keeps editing and suggesting. I never know how the little carvings will turn out, and that’s why I do them.
The Boat sculpture is the result of Jamie Buxton’s misbegotten attempt to pull me into the twentieth century. He showed me how to use rotary carvers, and The Boat is the result. It is a tribute to schools and to Carleton North High School, the building I spent the last twenty years in. It is an affectionate good bye to what I still think is the greatest, and most important, job in the world.” Colin Smith
Colin Smith
“Life inspires me. For years I drew people interacting, in supermarkets and streets. I drew high school kids, simultaneously terrified and deeply self-assured. And I drew thousands of cartoons, and published some of them in the Salon Section of the Telegraph Journal for a decade – historical, topical, linguistic – really anything but overtly political. I have a sketchbook with me always and I draw everything. It is, after all, a way of seeing.”

Gordon Dunphy Vessels
2021-03-27 - 2021-05-08
“What’s important to try to catch [is] the spirit that trees have, especially big old hardwood trees, and if I can catch that and make it look simple … the best forms are those that look as if they just happened.” Gordon Dunphy.
Gordon Dunphy lived on the banks of the Nashwaak River, near Taymouth, NB where he had a dairy farm until he turned from farming to embrace the art of wood turning, making a distinct and significant contribution to New Brunswick’s cultural landscape. The New Brunswick poet Michael Pacey has attributed an “innate sense of mischief as key to Dunphy’s explorations and subversions of time-honoured artistic binaries such as art and nature, art and craft, form and content, inside and outside.” Working with wood all his life, he turned stumps and gnarly burls into classic vessel forms, with paper-thin walls and highly polished surfaces, that maintain the distinctive characteristics of the original material and transcend the craft.
Some of his most distinctive pieces were created from burls, “when the cells start to grow faster than the tree itself, [they produce] a protruding growth on the tree. And often, not always, but often, it’s a beautiful grain in colour,” Dunphy said. The artist’s ability to find great beauty in a common, classic piece of New Brunswick nature, the hardwood tree, meant that very quickly his art was collected the world over, and he won every significant craft award in New Brunswick. “He just saw things in wood that nobody else could,” said Kate Rogers, previous director of the New Brunswick Crafts Council.
While co-curating this exhibition in 2019, Jennifer Pazienza observed that “Gordon is a poet whose verse is written upon and within his vessels. The object that stands before you, the spaces they create carry the poetic imagination of Gordon Dunphy. The poetics that constitute them resonate and reverberate with imagination that comes from the depths and reverie of his daydreams; a place where, as Gaston Bachelard said, time ceases to exist, and space is everything. These vessels ask us to consider ways they influence the space they occupy within the place we find them. They ask us to reflect upon them and our relationship to them, to engage with and beyond their surfaces and read between their lines and shape”.
Considered one of the finest wood turners in North America, nearly 30 works were donated to the Beaverbrook’s collection in 2009 after the artist died. Many of them are on view here. The collection was assembled by the artist as a legacy documenting his career. “In a sense, Dunphy curated this exhibition himself,” says John Leroux, the Gallery’s Manager of Collections and Exhibitions.
Exhibition co-curated by Jennifer Pazienza and John Leroux and organised by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.

Colin Smith: One Kilometre of Florenceville
2021-01-23 08:00 - 2021-03-13 17:00 (America/Halifax)
Colin Smith taught high school art, theatre, and English for 20 years. His work has been exhibited in galleries throughout NB and is included in public and private collections. For 11 years, his drawings and cartoons were featured weekly in the Salon section of the Telegraph Journal. He works out of his studio in the River Art Centre in downtown Florenceville-Bristol. He is represented by the Spicer Merrifield Gallery in Saint John, NB.
Colin Smith a enseigné les arts, le théâtre et l’anglais au lycée pendant 20 ans. Ses œuvres ont été exposées dans des galeries d’art dans tout le Nouveau-Brunswick et font partie de collections publiques et privées. Pendant 11 ans, ses dessins et ses caricatures ont été présentés chaque semaine dans la section “Salon” du Telegraph Journal. Il travaille dans son atelier au River Art Centre, dans le centre-ville de Florenceville-Bristol.

Artist Statement“Life inspires me. Right now I spend a lot of time drawing birds: sometimes in imagined situations, sometimes in an eighteenth century engraving kind of way – sometimes they are Nature, sometimes they the Wings of Time or the Broken Heart of a Poet, but usually they are just birds. The landscape around here is slowly driving me crazy, because every time I look at it, after looking at it for thirty years, I see it moving like a live thing, just a series of slow undulations, studded with trees and potato fields.
For years I drew people interacting, in supermarkets and streets. I drew high school kids, simultaneously terrified and deeply self-assured. And I drew thousands of cartoons, and published some of them in the Salon Section of the Telegraph Journal for a decade – historical, topical, linguistic – really anything but overtly political. I don’t hate enough to be a political cartoonist.
I draw constantly. I doodle on paper, in books, over shopping lists, throughout my teacher planning book. I have done it since grade one. I have been a nanny, a bookbinder, a used bookseller, a warehouseman, a handyman, and now I am a teacher, but it’s all to support my doodling habit. If I wasn’t selling anything, I would still be drawing.
When I was eight, I found a copy of Syd Hoff’s “How to be a Cartoonist” in the Saint John Public Library. That, along with Jim Corbett’s “Maneaters of Kumaon” and the Freddy the Pig Detective books, was my Bible. Syd Hoff claimed you could make a living as a cartoonist, so I started in third grade. I filled notebooks with comic strips, and mailed some cartoons off to Playboy, which they politely returned. My rejection notice collection is still growing.
I have a sketchbook with me always, which I fill with phrases or doodles or ideas of what I see around me, and what I am thinking about. If I don’t set them down, they are lost. I roughly block out a drawing in pencil, usually working from these sketches, and then have at it with pen and ink. I like the finality of ink – once you put the mark on the paper, it is there. It encourages a mix of fluidity and improvisation. I tried technical pens, but I prefer the dip pens. The ink is usually richer, and the line of a dip pen modulates – it gets thinner and thicker as you go. The drawing is crosshatched and toned in with pen lines, then sometimes coloured ink washes or watercolour are added. A lot of my tonal squiggles have come from old engravings, where shading and tone were built up with marks, then a flat wash would be added to finish it off, and the ink and the wash would work together to create a strange volume.
I draw everything. It is, after all, a way of seeing.”

Sarah Jones: Idyll
2021-01-23 - 2021-03-13
Artist StatementMy art practice explores interactions with manufactured and industrial landscapes through painting and installation. I am particularly interested in how Maritime cities and the local industrial heritage of Saint John contribute to notions of regional identity.
Stephen Parrish, Coast of New Brunswick, 1882, Etching
Years ago, I encountered this etching in the New Brunswick Museum by American artist Stephen Parrish (1846-1938) and learned that he and a fellow artist passed through Saint John, NB in the summer of 1881on an etching and painting tour of the Maritime provinces. Coast of New Brunswick, 1882, features small sailing vessels, rustic wharves, fisher folk and the quiet harbour of Saint John. The rusticity in the depiction did not correspond with what my understanding was of Saint John in the late nineteenth-century. I was a history student at the time, and I knew enough to recognize a disconnect. Saint John of 1881 would hardly have been described as quaint. The city, then as now, was an industrial centre with shipping and construction activity and port-side factories. This disconnect – depicting the quaintly idyllic and rustic where there should be industrialization – is not an isolated phenomenon. Parrish was part of a wider tradition in British and American landscape painting of the nineteenth century of romanticizing the rural and the maritime. This quest for the picturesque meant avoiding or creatively re-framing evidence of modernity and industrialization and in doing so, reaffirming a pervasive idea that the pre-industrial embodies something that is somehow purer and more authentic.
Idyll, 2019 responds to Parrish’s etching, by restaging in the painting, the same 360-degree landscape surveyed from the same vantage point as the historical work. Moveable screens allow only some portions of the painting to be seen, which I hope signal the artist’s role in directing the gaze and deciding what is left in or out of the frame. I would like this artwork to remind us of the agency of both artist and viewer and prompt the questions: what are we seeing? What and who is included or excluded and why? What is beyond our gaze?
More recently I have been looking at historical representations of Maritime landscape in art and questioning the role of these landscapes in constructing a narrative about the ideal Maritime landscape. I am currently working on projects, including the storm paintings, that explore the role of historical representations in crafting current social attitudes towards manufactured/industrialized landscape, how nostalgia for an imagined or idealized historical landscape impacts current regional identity, and how notions of the historical ‘Folk’ manifest in myself and my own identity.
BiographySarah Jones (BA, MA Art History) is a visual artist, art historian and curator. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions across Canada and abroad, and her work is held in the public collections of the University of New Brunswick and the New Brunswick Art Bank. Jones is a recipient of numerous grants and awards, including funding from ArtsNB and Canada Council for the Arts.
Jones is based in Saint John, New Brunswick. In addition to her own practice, she is the curator at Jones Gallery and teaches art history occasionally at University of New Brunswick.
The artist would like to acknowledge support from ArtsNB and Canada Council for the Arts.
Video Interview with Sarah Jones
