One moment, one thought, one meaning

Have you ever had one moment that lead to one thought that lead to one meaning? Maybe if you are the creative type you can think of days where your inspiration leads to something tangible and it is extremely rewarding. Young artists at Brock University are showcasing the outcome of those days.

An art show will be taking place this month that can be described as “One moment, one thought, one meaning,” as Kimberly French, third year visual arts student explains.

 “I wanted it to represent the whole process of our artwork.”

Kimberly and fellow VISA students, Sara McCowell and Lauren Regier are those individuals whose artwork will be exhibited. The three artists have been working hard to plan this event for friends, family, fellow VISA and Brock students to be able to view the labors of their love.

The three artists were all in the same class this semester, working on a body of work that helped them research and develop where they eventually wanted to go with it. Their instructor encouraged them to organize an exhibit to push them in a positive direction.

“It was more of a dream if anything. The more we talked, the more excited we got about it. We didn’t know how much work actually went into planning the event,” said McCowell, third-year Concurrent Education student.

McCowell always wanted to go to school at Brock. She notes how there is a small community feeling in St. Catharines compared to McMaster in Hamilton, where she originates from. Hamilton’s ability to demonstrate its artistic and cultural diversity through downtown art crawls is something that she hopes the Brock community can get behind as the downtown core in St. Catharines bursts through and becomes more noticeable.

Regier, a St. Catharines local, shares her excitement about the art scene in Niagara being up and coming and pushing forward every year.

It is no surprise that with Brock being located on top of the escarpment, it isolates sub-cultural possibilities that are awaiting elsewhere. With the construction of the Academic and Cultural Art Centre, such opportunities may soon exist.

Since their pieces were for a drawing course, the art show will be focusing on the artists’ own interpretation of what defines drawing by using many different mediums for their pieces.

French’s work incorporates drafting and architecture with a fantasy or fairy-tale-like impression that are colorful and features roman architecture like the onion dome. She uses chalk pastel and especially likes to highlight features like windows.

French enjoys looking to surrealist art movements to draw inspiration. Remedios Varo was a Spanish-Mexican surrealist  painter whom she admires. The exercises they use to develop drawings from dreams are encouraging to French as an artist.

“I will get inspired very easily. Right now my dad is building a garage and this architectural drawing is inspired by him. Also,  things my friends say and dreams. Mainly dreams. I write them down and turn them into artwork,” said French.

Regier, who is focusing on the depression-era, sees her art as more post-impressionistic with many layers.

“You can tell I was listening to some sort of grim playlist on my iPod because it was just melting wax, scratching it off, and throwing it on. It’s very thick and very heavy so to me it carries a lot of emotion of what I threw onto the canvas so I am hoping it will be perceived that way,” she said.

Regier finds inspiration in street artists like Barry McGee who pushes for post-gallery art by bringing it to the streets. He is known for his artwork being stolen, similar to what has happened to street artist, Bansky. Even a 60-foot mural of McGee’s was stolen a week after it was completed.

Although Regier admits that admiring Pablo Picasso is cliché, his “Guernica” piece is exciting to her because of the many complex sketches leading up to the process of painting. Although the ability for artists to push out drawn sketches over and over is impressive, Regier prefers free-forming her art in hopes of creating something as chaotic.

With canvas sizes for the class being fixed to over four feet, McCowell fills them by creating mental maps. Franz Ackermann coined the phrase where mental maps are presentations of a memory, place or time or a person.

“Ackermann does really abstract memories of cities and places he has been. So, for example, one of his pieces is one with a bunch of abstract buildings with chaos in the back and colours everywhere, and that would be his mental representation of a place,” she said. “My pieces are of maps of times in my life mostly as a child. One of my pieces is of a tunnel I would crawl through at Royal Botanical Gardens with my brothers. Another one is of my old house.”

 The young artists have diverse visions of one moment, one thought and one meaning, but they all agree that the process of creating art is therapeutic and are excited to share it.

One moment, one thought, one meaning will be held in the Brock Sean O’Sullivan theatre on March 21 to April 6 from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., and the opening reception will be held from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. on March 26. Admission is free.