TERRY FENTON PAINTINGS
ATTENDANCE,
Near Rosetown, Sask., 2011. Oil on
panel, 24 x 39 in.
Grassland
and grassland, mile after mile. There were straight roads here, and little
farming towns with grain elevators. All this was marvelously welcome to me.
"Why do I love it so much?" I said... "Is it because it isn't
scenery?
-- Alice Munro
The
wide-open spaces of Saskatchewan seem the antithesis of what Alice Munro called
"scenery". They're not hemmed in by trees and interrupted by
"views." They're "everywhere all-at-once."
The
Saskatchewan prairies are the big part of Canada that the Group of Seven didn't
paint. "Bury me not on the lone prairie," lamented A. Y. Jackson.
"I could do nothing with the place." Because of their apparent lack
of scenery, the open prairies haven't been much painted by anyone. Even
painters who've flourished in Saskatchewan have preferred the river valleys in
the plains or the aspen parkland to the north and east. While I admire and have
absorbed much from them, I'm drawn south and west to the grasslands -- partly
because I was born and raised in Regina, but also because the color and light
there is so luminous. And because the solutions found by painters from the past
don't work well in the wide-open spaces, I look for new ones.
It
has been said that due to their familiarity with wide horizons Saskatchewan
natives make good seamen. Maybe so. In any event, when I'm in Victoria for that
very reason I look out to sea.
A
word about materials: Many of these paintings are painted with oil paint on
paper: high quality rag watercolour paper. This medium is by no means new,
having been used by artists as accomplished as Corot and Vuillard. Their
paintings, not protected by glass, have stood the test of time both physically
and aesthetically.
Terry
Fenton
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Credit lines indicate present location of works. All consigned works or works
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LAND AND SEA
NEW: OCEANS
A selection of paintings of
prairie and sea subjects
some to be shown at Winchester Galleries, Victoria, October 10-30, 2004
You are
painting some seriously good pictures, Fenton. Some of the color, and the
affinity of the pictures with the landscapes (not just looking like but feeling
like) is eerie.
-- Walter Darby Bannard, Sept 7/04
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OLDER
PAINTINGS
a mini-retrospective
changed Nov 5, 2000
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