Expanded Fragments

At Winchester Galleries on Broad Street

March 5 - 31, 2009

Opening:
 Thursday, March 5, 2009
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Victoria artist Dan MacDougall grew up in Vernon and graduated in 1971 from the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University).  In recent years his reductive and abstract style has interpreted minute, clear-focus, curved patterns found in the environment, particularly landscape.  He also gives prominence to colour.  These elements are planned ahead; the colours, for instance, are numbered and charted.
 
For each work in the current series, MacDougall applied liquid acrylic to two sheets of paper and laid them upon a board to create a central horizon.  The paper was shifted slightly from side to side to line up the colours and tones, yet though that calibration was pre-planned, the duplication and therefore a matching of the contours was deliberately unplanned.  The vertical contours at the horizon usually, therefore, do not elide.  MacDougall notes that the horizon is the one area which was left to some chance.  He strived here for, evidently, a degree of uncertainty.  The final step in the making of the paintings involved adhesing the papers to the board and covering them with three coats of polymar varnish which renders the surface very durable.
 
Dan MacDougall is represented in the permanent collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Bank, the Norman Mackenzie Art gallery and the CBC.  He recently completed a large commission for DePM Design Inc. in Toronto.