writings - carlyn yandle

Gritty beauty seen in foundations of this pretty city

2/28/2017

It feels like the Internet has killed the fun of taking snapshots of beautiful cities and people. So many times over the last four months in Mexico I've raised my camera (phone) to capture an impressive bronze sculpture or some baroque church facade then thought: This is pointless. A Google-image search with a few key words (Guanajuato, musicians, Don Quixote, Pipila) would produce hundreds of better-quality stock photos. We're saturated in instagrammable images. I miss those old pocket travel photo albums.

This might explain all the selfie sticks threatening to take your eye out in the crowded plazas on any given night here; putting yourself in the picture with all the famous stuff behind will guarantee a unique photo.

So I have very little in terms of a photographic record for my time here. Every view of the strolling musicians in the plazas, or the teenage girls decked in ballgowns for their quinceanera (debut) parties, the food vendors, the street singers dressed in Renaissance-style hose and puffed velvet jackets are already done. So done.

Then last week I finally started to see that the one signature-Guanajuato element that I've been captivated by is actually a worthy photo subject: the retaining walls that barely seem to be holding back the jumble of colourful, cubic houses clinging to the surrounding hills.

There's a compelling visual story in those layers of peeling paint on crumbling plaster on adobe bricks stacked on crudely cut limestone foundations. The traces of human activity in one section of wall speaks to the human habitation in this city that has its roots in the 1500s. It's quite a study in social history and handwork, an unplanned, almost invisible beauty, especially to a tourist whose port town of Vancouver has been replaced by a gleaming, pristine city of glass.

I'm seeing them as found abstracts, images of unintentional collages and mixed-media works by generations of people who work with their hands.

Big painting shift at little house on the prairie

9/19/2016

Day 12 painting: Embroidered details in a scene of a newly "thrashed" hay field.

I've just returned from a month in the big country of southwest Saskatchewan: big skies, big farming operations, big empty days that were all too much at the start of my artist residency at the Wallace Stegner House.

Suddenly agoraphobic, I pulled down all the blinds and paced around that lovely century-old house, wondering what on earth possessed me to throw myself into this imposing patchwork landscape. I am not a landscape painter; that's my dad's bag.

Plus I came by plane and an eight-hour car ride, so even if I did want to paint, I didn't have my usual large stretched canvases and totes of paints. I did bring a few of my usual travel essentials: embroidery hoops, needles and floss — and an old bed sheet. I knew there was just a couple of stores in town, and none would be selling art supplies so I packed a tiny travel set of liquid acrylics, a few brushes and a pad of mixed-media cardstock.

My sketchy plan involved, well, sketching with my father, who has spent some of every summer in this tiny town of Eastend ever since he filled the Stegner House with his landscape paintings 15 years ago.

We were quite a pair: me, not at all comfortable with the whole plein-air tradition, and him, increasingly unfamiliar with his life's work of painting that involved biking into the country to sketch then returning to his basement to paint in the heat of the day. (Actually we were mostly a trio, his wife acting as facilitator for whatever this was, supplying us with water bottles, sunhats, sketch pads and willow charcoal, and generally getting us on the road.)

We circled around this vague idea of mine as we circled around this dead-quiet, struggling little town every morning. But the awkwardness turned to anguish back at my studio as I undertook the tedious pursuit of finding some interest — or even the point — in painting puffy clouds and dun-coloured hills.

A week later and out of sheer frustration at my lack of landscape-painting prowess, I resorted to dropping diluted paint on a taut scrap of bedsheet in an embroidery hoop just to watch it bleed. I threw the first painted scrap away and did another, with a little more intention, then threw that away too. Within a couple of hours I figured out the right water-to-paint ratio to create a slightly controlled bloom with each stroke. A lot of other distracted behaviour (baking apple crisps, walking by the river, venting via text to my artist friends) meant that each additional stroke was added to a dried layer and by the end of the afternoon, a landscape was emerging on a miniature stretched canvas. That one I didn't throw out. But it was still a little hazy. That's when I thought about using my stash of embroidery floss for final line work.

I sat in the cool of the front screened porch that evening and embroidered some more information onto the painting. It was a clumsy first effort but soon I was enjoying the daily practice of biking in the morning with my father, painting something inspired by the ride in the afternoon, then embroidering some details in the evening, inviting others to join me for stitching sessions on the front porch.

I did this every day until I had 12 little paintings, each a progression from the last. I saw them as blocks for a future quilt, which led to a well-attended culminating exhibit, "Scenes from a Quilted Landscape."

But now I'm viewing them as something beyond a quilt and beyond the horizon. I'm calling them Points of Interest: something to build on and build with.

As with all creative pursuits, forcing solutions is futile. My original idea of coaxing my father back into his painting studio by getting him to share some of his process with me was a non-starter. These days he finds everyday joy in the moment, whether that is spotting a hawk while biking the backroads, playing a languid rendition of The Girl from Ipanema on piano in the hot afternoons, or watching the town's many cats on the prowl from the front porch of the Stegner House while his wife and I embroidered the summer evenings away.

I'm not sure if he knew it but he passed on to me the most valuable lesson for painting a scene: You have to actually see it.

My first effort: a clunky rendition of the Wallace Stegner House

Day 2: Black bridge behind the Stegner House, in black stitches

Day 3: Fun with architectural detail and embroidered lettering

Day 4: Sky and hills and embroidered sunflowers facing the morning sun

Day 5: Our hangout: coffee shop and pottery studio, surrounded by gardens

Day 6: The silty back roads, llike biking on velvet. (Wheel-seizing "gumbo" when wet)

Day 7: Embroidery showing the flight path of a hostile hawk

Day 8: Big skies and tiny grain elevator

Day 9: Old Beaver Lumber building in the nearby almost-ghost town

Day 10: The observatory, in some of the darkest skies in Canada

Day 11: "The Town of Eastend" rock formation in the hills, in embroidery

Slide-showing the process:

Painting to Capture the rapture in the everyday

10/16/2015

Gotta love Salvation Army and the staff's peculiar display choices. Every other store would break up all the retail items so each one looks unique, but at my local Salarmy they sort by colour, making finding your size sort of a crapshoot. But oh, that visual field! Those collections make my eyes feel like they're turning into those cartoon black-and-white hypnotizing wheel things.

Same thing at the MAC counter or the Shoppers Drug Mart cosmetics aisle. I don't have much use for all the lipsticks and nail polishes but I will go out of my way to pass those vibrating, too-exciting colour grids of reds, oranges, pinks, purples, golds. Rosy rows that that set the soul a-glow!

I am inspired. I take photos, I go to the studio. I try to find that colour-field rapture.

Distracts: Big Red, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 72" X 36"

It's all too exciting, too exhilarating and just the thing for stopping my useless 'what if' and 'if only' thinking — or the screen-peering and pecking.

This latest painting might be better titled, Stop Sign, a visually loud/silent call to "Don't just say something, stand there."

But I will stick to Big Red, part of my ongoing Distracts series. Part meditation, part endurance test, part quilting, part painting, as fractured and distracting as our accelerated world.

Who says sculpture has no business in business?

3/27/2015

I liked the idea of messing with the overlooked and the banal to open up possible new understandings about preconceived notions.

There was something delicious about a collection of attractive objects -- flat white familiar forms at a personal/counter-top scale -- that is also just a little disturbing for its wrongness. Those little electrical cords suggest hazard. They seem to say, Whatever you do, don't plug us in, so in a sense they have some visual power.

I was thinking about Martha Rosler's groundbreaking feminist video, "Semiotics of the Kitchen" (1975 - edited version below) when I came up with my "Unfixtures" sculpture series.

Ah, the power of uncertain objects. What was an experiment in found-object sculpture is an eye-catching visual for a company in the business of creative work.

Eggbeater Creative's new brochure (Clay Yandle photo)

"I love the plug part," my brother Clay said in a text the other day, after sending me pics of his company's latest brochures and business cards. "It makes it real... like you could fire it up and it would start doing whatever the hell it would do."

Unfixtures are a permanent fixture (when they're not showing in a gallery) at my brother's office. One of the pieces in particular seemed to be speaking to him as he was trying to come up with a name for a new web-design/branding partnership a while back.

"It was the perfect storm of me trying so hard to come up with a name and just staring at the sculpture led me to understand how this business was the mix of two companies," he wrote. eggbeater creative was born.

"It was whimsical and interesting, and then there was the obvious part of the eggbeaters working as light bulb (idea) metaphors. The sculpture had traditionally conflicted parts, but they were together in a way that worked."

The company logo (seen at the bottom left of the brochure in this image) riffs on the sculpture and the lower-case 'e'.

Below: A time-lapsed view of a painting commissioned for Eggbeater Creative:

Compelling art all part of the protest

11/28/2014

The war in the woods is heating up again. Except it's not the people against forestry giants MacMillan-Bloedel or Fletcher Challenge; on this day it's Kinder Morgan.

Yagis Eating an Oil Tanker by Ian Reid Nusi. (Photo by Christopher Glawe)

Oil-pipeline officials are doing their best to try to shape protestors at Burnaby Mountain these past weeks as a small group of environmentalist wackos. Meanwhile, the movement is growing. And so is the art.

Marshall McLuhan said, "Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it." And that's what I think about when I see this work by Ian Reid Nusi. Yup, that would be an oil tanker in that sea monster's mouth, carved in response to the prospect of the Northern Gateway oil pipeline moving tar sands diluted bitumen to the coast and onto tankers. (Artist interview clip below)

Environmental protests have shaped this province, and some important artworks have been a part of that.

Wallace's CP IV, 1993-95, 178 x 300 cm (from Canadian Art magazine)

It's in Ian Wallace's large-scale photo collage murals (reconfirmed as important works five years later in Canadian Art magazine).

His plywood patterns interrupt the protest images from the summer of 1993, the height of the fight to save Clayoquot Sound, the largest unlogged temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island. About 800 protestors were arrested and carted away, while Wallace created a whole new way of seeing art, protest and the role and position of the visual artist.

Wallace's artworks endure, and also serve as a reminder to those who view them in galleries that what multinational corporation spin-doctors would like to refer to as a green-y lunatic fringe is actually a large and diverse population of British Columbians who are willing to inconvenience themselves for the sake of protecting the oceans or the last of the great rainforests.

Headwaters of the Stein, B.C., August 1988 (from tonionley.com)

Toni Onley has been in there too. As part of the large protest to protect the Stein Valley from logging, he organized a plan to fly in well-established artists to the vital watershed area to paint their impressions, with sales going to help the campaign to save it from a plan for the Mitsubishi company to log the old growth for disposable chopsticks.

Onley, who died in 2004, recalled painting a watercolour in support of a Stein cultural centre while “Chief Perry Redon, the chairman of the Lilloet Tribal Council... beat his drum and sang to the four quarters. I was inspired and soon we had a watercolour for the Stein poster….”

Ken Wu photo by T.J. Watt (tjwatt.com)

Many paintings of the beauty of the protested areas of the Stein, the Carmanah Valley, Clayoquot Sound helped fund the continuing protest, and today form important collections and are captured in coffee table books like Carmanah: Artistic Visions of an Ancient Rainforest.

But there's nothing like a compelling photograph to bring the stark reality of the protest home.

T.J. Watt's photo of Ken Wu, the Ancient Forest Alliance’s executive director, sits atop a massive red cedar stump in the Upper Walbran Valley on Vancouver Island. The photo earns its place as an important visual of the struggle to retain a small portion of the natural environment, but its place is also determined by this image that is forceful in its subject of scale and a unique moment in time.

Shawn Hunt's Untitled, 2013

The Kinder Morgan survey crew has to be out of Burnaby Mountain in a few days, but the protests against the transport of a dirty, risky diluted bitumen in lieu of real government investment in clean energy sources has just begun.

It's there on the faces of the growing protestors, and in the art that's growing along with it. And sometimes, as in this surrealist portrait by Shawn Hunt, it's in the faces in the art.

This is the history of environmental struggle in this corner of the world, and part of the history of art, too.

Feeling the squeeze all part of the practice

10/17/2014

Janet Wang plays with the Madonna and Child mainstay.

I spent most of the day yesterday sitting with a very close friend in a hospital bed, waiting for the surgeon to slice into her gut and remove a large cyst and maybe an ovary or two. Or maybe all her lady parts. There was frank talk about the expected pooling blood and lingering pain and there were some last-minute tears as she was wheeled away.

It was hardly the time to go mingle at a gallery that night, but friends and family would be there for the opening of the Domestic Interventions show so it was the right thing to do. My sister exhibitors, Monique Motut-Firth and Janet Wang, had probably wrestled with attending too; they were both fending off whatever bad colds their little kids had brought home. But we all showed, and even managed to say a few words about the work.

Monique Motut-Firth: Portrait of the artist

I mention all this because this is what the work is about: trying to nurture an art practice when there is other, more pressing nurturing to be done, not to mention the cleaning and the making-a-living. Sometimes you just have to laugh over the lunacy of trying to paint or build or cut or even think amidst the domestic pressures; sometimes you’re ready to toss it all in, but don’t because you know this ability to express the predicament is what holds you together.

That’s why this show includes uneasy domestic objects, uncomfortable self-portraits and sculptures, paper dolls composed of the fictitious feminine form from women’s catalogues. We brought these works together to talk to one another, and to try to convey that dis-ease of the familiar with the strange. There’s something funny about a tiny mother-artist figurine gnawing through the telephone wire or a mannequin wrapped in 1950s ads of ecstatic home-makers or a long line of girdled paper dolls, but there’s a dark side too.

Body of Work, by Carlyn Yandle

We love our families and our home life but we need our art practices too. We may live in a corner of the world that respects cultural workers as much as welfare recipients but we can’t help ourselves. Our domestic world and our work as artists will continue to twist and intertwine and something will continue to emerge that will evoke the messy, conflicted, emotionally charged and banal everyday.

And that’s important.

***

Domestic Interventions, curated by Jo Dunlop, runs from Oct. 17 to Nov. 15 at Cityscape Community Arts Space gallery, 335 Lonsdale Ave., North Vancouver (three blocks from Seabus terminal). Hours: Mon-Wed, Fri. – 9 am-5 pm, Thursdays 9 am–8 pm,  Saturday noon-5 pm.

Desperately seeking lost painting

8/22/2014

Grey Lace, 2014, by Carlyn Yandle. Acrylic on canvas, 40" x 67"

This week I am testing the usefulness of social media in locating a painting.

Grey Lace is not my first commission, but a favourite, done over two months this past winter. It is an abstract field in muted tones with shards of red and aqua that references a particular handmade doily, on a ground of many layers of glaze. (See video of the making of this painting here.)

It was designed for a living room in Budapest (renowned for handmade lace) but left behind in the International departure lounge at Vancouver International Airport on Aug. 3.

The owner of the lost painting is, understandably, more than a little sheepish. The Lost and Found office clerk knows him by name now due to his frequent transcontinental phone calls. Has it shown up? Any word?

The 40" x 67" acrylic-on-canvas was prepared for carry-on travel, sandwiched in acid-free paper and rolled onto a tube, then wrapped in protective plastic and taped securely on all seams. It was set down in the meal-purchase area in the evening hours before the family of four's 13-hour journey and forgotten in the group's carry-on luggage.

Photo: thriftshopperforpeace.wordpress.com

There are a million stories about personal items left behind at airports, never to be found again. My mother once left her jacket in one of the grey bins in security but it was gone without a trace even before her flight left. This is the risk of circulating in an international travel hub that saw almost 18 million passengers pass through in 2013 and more than 9 million passengers in the first six months of this year alone.

About 250,000 items were surrendered at Canada’s eight major airports in 2011, with most of it ending up in the trash due to the extreme volume stuff and severe space restrictions at the nation's biggest airport, Pearson. It's a better scenario here at YVR where the airport chapel accepts the seized and the unclaimed and sells it at its Fridays-only chaplaincy thrift store, open noon to 5 p.m. at 4871 Miller Rd. on Sea Island. (Promotional video below).

But we're in the opposite position: trying to claim something that can't be found. I'm heading out to the store anyway on faint hope that the tube is standing in a corner somewhere. Or maybe, just maybe — and this may be where the social media miracle comes in — it was purchased and is hanging on a wall somewhere. Maybe I can work out something with that buyer.

It's a nicer thought than the picture that keeps popping up in my head: Grey Lace In Landfill.

Words are not enough to capture the seduction of distraction

6/6/2014

Distracts #1, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 33"W x 27"H.

To me, the easiest part about carving out a place in the visual arts world is writing something about it. Yet most of my artist colleagues don't know how I make myself do it on a weekly basis. Easy. It only took 20 years of deadline writing for newspapers.

'Easiest' isn't quite the right word; it's more like 'reliable.' I can rely on the fact that if I sit down at a blank screen, soon words will link into sentences, inspired and connected by images. It's really just a habit at this point. If I don't get the chance to try to make literal sense of the past week, things start to swirl up into a ball of confusion. But once it's out there, it's done and I can move on.

Distracts #2, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 33"W x 27"H.

If only my days at my shared studio were as reliable. I wish I could start the morning with the same confidence as I stare at the freshly gesso'd blank canvas, and have the same conversation I get from writing a column (okay, blog). The two sides of my brain do not dance together at the studio. I do not enjoy the small eureka moments of understanding, or any great leaps forward in concept. And unlike weekly writing, I can't see that I'm creating any history of my process/progress.

Distracts #3, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 33"W x 27"H.

Some days I feel like I'm just painting myself into corners, or cycling back to where I started months ago. I often need to call in the reinforcements — artist friends — for a studio visit, when I ask, "Am I flat-lining here?" or "Am I a one-trick pony?"

But words work for me. Letters soon coalesce into strands of ideas and I can see one taking shape as I write, dropping in these images of my latest paintings.

Distracts #4, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 33"W x 27"H.

This much I know is true: This is the most distractive time in human history and I live in a neighbourhood that is arguably the nation's capital of everything yoga. As I ride to the studio, I'm generally pre-occupied with this idea of the swell of interest in personal, meditative practice or escape juxtaposed with the seduction of our screens and the growing realization that our personal identities can be stolen in a click of a button.

Distracts #5, 2014, acrylic on panel, 14"W x 16"H.

I think about how we crave peace of mind and heart but are captivated by the fantastic and unfathomable, packaged in high-def or in 3-D, with same-day shipping, something to Like, Share, Tweet, post to Instagram/Tumblr/Pinterest.

Some days at the studio I just need to retreat, retrace the lace. Other days I need to feel the fracturing of that focus.

If painting really is a conversation the painter has with the materials, surface, technique and image, I'm seeing that this is talking about a kind of mapping out of an understanding of the here and now, where words fail.

Distracts #6, 2014, acrylic on panel, 16"W x 20"H.

It's somewhere in the uneasy spaces between the digital and the handmade, the personal craft expression and the art industry.

Put into words, it's a little terrifying to be in unexplored territory with no obvious path ahead.

I'm just bush-wacking until I find a clearing.

How not to crash at the big art shows

5/9/2014

The mammoth art museum experience is like an all-inclusive resort for the mind: there's so much coming at you the brain binges 'til it can't party anymore.

Unless you're an art history major, what's hanging on those soaring walls and placed on those marble floors at the big art palaces like the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum and The Met is filled with cranial-clanging mystery, intrigue, obscurity, beauty and repulsion that can crash the whole neural system in something approaching Stendhal Syndrome. There's only so much visual field one garden-variety brain can take in. You need to pace yourself, preferably over several days.

Alison Woodward's emblematic, multi-layered drawings suggest carcasses.

Same goes for big education-institution shows so this is the how I tackle the annual Emily Carr University Grad Show, now open daily until May 18 on Vancouver's Granville Island.

With hundreds of final works in media arts, sculpture, industrial design, ceramics, illustration and visual arts packed into two buildings I take the cavernous rooms of randomness in small bursts over a few days, usually with one friend at a time — a sort of playdate. But the only thing organized about this date is the area of creative work we're going to linger in. It's the difference between sports on a school field and free play in the forest.

The real play is in the conversation that is sparked just by being in the milieu of this cacophonous visual field. It might start off as first impressions of an individual piece but often ends up in a whole different kind of thinking, and that's where the exhilaration lies. It's all just as important in the creative process as working in the studio.

The beauty of online column-writing is infinite space, so, in the spirit of the gargantuan art museum and its daunting theme-free collections, as well as the need to let the brain out to play, I present here a few of my own pics of emerging visual artists at this year's Emily Carr grad show whose works contest the two-dimensional tradition.

A detail from Jessica Probyn's large gestural painting reveals a threaded leaf-shaped garland.

The ethereal effect of Colette Stubbings' large 'Channeling Dreams' is enhanced by a ground of creased, ripped and crumpled paper.

Rose Fior's 'Ominous I' is an off-square panel that includes areas of gouging, thin washed and dimensional globs of paint.

The visceral subject of Sarah Erica Berman Goble's work moves from two grounds of paper to the wall itself.

A detail of Scott Lewis' inked, ripped paper on canvas evokes both disputed public spaces and stark landscapes.

Maya Gulin explores the pattern effects of acrylic in this detail of her deftly layered mixed media painting.

inspiration found at accountant's office

4/25/2014

With the same anticipation as a root canal I plopped down in a chair at the accountant's office. Then gasped and pointed, then tried not to point at the adjacent bookcase stuffed with client files.
The accountant flipped through my own paperwork. I flipped out my phone and hit the camera app while nodding vaguely.

Carlyn Yandle photo

You can have your heli-skiing, your chemically-enhanced club nights, your YouTubed jack-assery; my exhilaration comes from being confronted by these breathtaking visual moments. The effect is enhanced by the purity of the completely uncontrived art object or visual field in its incongruous environment.

Never mind this delicious chrome-y palette that is simply a coded filing system; the whole filing...uh, object radiates with the yearly summations of individuals' spending and earnings, losses and gains that mean everything and nothing. Each colour-bound bundle evokes the stress of tax filing, of legitimizing one's existence, of facing up to the obligation of submitting and committing and remitting, of coming clean or engaging in some white-collar-cheating — or of the quiet shame in not managing to do this whole filing thing on one's own. (That can't just be me.)

All that emotional intensity bundled and stacked and gridded is powerful stuff, but it also feels old timey, almost nostalgic now that we are squinting at the brightly-coded visual depictions in the dawn of big data. The non-object colour fields of information are persuasive and invasive, even in my own studio work. (Below: two paintings in the developing Fabrications series of acrylic on canvas.)

Digital imagery may boast sophisticated information (and limitless space) but the overstuffed file-pile at the accountant's resonates with heft, weight and compression. It's also heavy with 'the hand': the human activity of handling files, cases, persons.

Everything is awesome, as the kids insist on singing post-Lego Movie. But the relentless data-scene enhances other accidental art objects that are in opposition to lurid digital fields. I get the same visual slam when I see it in the concrete cracks between the glass condo towers, or, below, somehow blooming where they are not planted under an off-ramp and against a sub-station wall.

Carlyn Yandle photo

These filigree moments of respite also manage to infuse their way into my own work, quite unconsciously. It is only in hindsight that I see the impact of these accidental artworks. (See Grey Lace, below and a video documenting the making of this painting.)

Another lesson in the notion that art makes the artist.

Grey Lace, 2014, Carlyn Yandle, acrylic on canvas, 50" x 40"