(( at 2260 Oak Bay Ave.)

Preview: Saturday, November 4, 2006 10 am - 5:30 pm

(work subject to prior sale)

Opening Reception: Sunday, November 5, 2006 1:00 - 5:00 pm

Artist in attendance; Elizabeth Ely, harpist

Exhibition continues until November 25, 2006

My first 20 years were spent in rural Prince Edward Island- literally surrounded by woods. It is not surprising then that, in the early 1970s, I thought a lot about painting landscape. But my first love was expressionist figure painting. How, I wondered, does one move from that to depicting earth and sky with its very different emotional implications? It was seeing a Maxwell Bates exhibition of landscapes that showed the way in. He was a figure painter whom I admired greatly. In his landscape I saw the passion of a figurative style translated into trees and sky and paint.

For the past 20 years, I have turned again and again to the solace and the threat of land. Early paintings explored wilderness unmarked by even a telephone wire. Later I stopped looking from afar - moved closer to the landscape as though I lived within it - and painted it with its indicators of human occupation.

Recently I have juxtaposed landscape with plaids (part of my Scottish, Irish upbringing on P.E.I.). I use the plaids as a metaphor for technology. These plaids promise everything with their vertical-meets-horizontal lines referring to the pre-Christian metaphor of cross/Mandela. Technology offers us the future, is very seductive and beautiful if we can forget its role in coercing us out of our nature loving bodies to live in our intellectual, clear cutting minds.

In these paintings I have variously presented these nature vs. man concerns on canvas to reconstruct their relationships. This is the role of painting: to present in a non-discursive way the elements of our human concerns so that intuition may have a role in connecting information which threatens to disastrously disconnect.

Leslie Poole