https://soundcloud.com/studio22-sounds/aviva-jacob-interviews-patti-emmerson-artist
Tag: paint
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Studio interview with Patti Emmerson
Patti Emmerson is bursting with energy as she invites me into her home. She speaks with her hands and greets me with a smile on her face which truly sets the tone as I enter the small room that acts as her studio. The floors are splattered with paint and the walls are covered with Patti’s art.
Some of the pieces filling the room look almost too big to have possibly been created there. Patti explains that she works on the floor and takes up the whole room with her process. As a physical person she moves with her art and moves to music as she creates. She starts each day by cranking up her stereo and allowing herself to get into the physicality of her work.
As we continue talking I look around and realize that there is something missing from this art studio – there are no brushes. Patti laughs as she tells me that she uses anything and everything, except brushes, to move her paint. She creates her abstract scenes with a myriad of painters tools but doesn’t feel the brush can do exactly what she wants in this body of work.
As I look around the art itself leaves me staggered in the doorway. Though the pieces are still in progress they are already complex with strong texture and movement jumping off each canvas. Beside each piece sits a small, polaroid sized photograph of a scene. Patti uses these photos, most taken by the artist herself, as a base for a new painting.
The photos, in contrast with the abstracted paintings, give the viewer a timeline of the artist’s process and her more recent experiences. The collection of photographs were taken in a combination of Fernie, BC; Patti’s home for the past twenty years and in Kingston, ON; where Patti now resides.
My viewing of the body of work leaves me feeling refreshed and excited. Patti’s energy is evident in each piece. From wall to wall I am taken on an adventure down unreal streets, up abstracted mountains, and through obscure forests.
Standing and looking between a photographic scene of reality and a canvas bursting with incomprehensible colour and texture I find myself catching a brief glimpse into the mind of Patti Emmerson.
Written by Aviva Jacob
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Inside Debra Krakow’s Studio
Local artist Debra Krakow lives with her family on Wolfe Island in a beautiful self-designed home. As an architect Krakow designed the house for her young family in the mid 90s. At the top of this tall, yellow structure sits a small, bright studio, tailor made by and for the artist who resides in it.
Walking through the family home I am bombarded with colour and texture filling all possible hanging space on the walls. I am charmed by the beautiful music floating from the piano in the living room, filling the whole house (not to mention the homemade cookies and peppermint tea I am offered upon arrival).
The art, though covering a spectrum of styles and mediums, is amazingly produced by the same artist. Krakow uses her home and personal space as a platform to display her art to her family and guests when it’s not being shown in galleries throughout Ontario.
While climbing the final stairs to reach the glowing room at the peak of the house I find myself entering a blooming garden of warm colours and textures just leaping off every wall and surface. Looking out the windows I can see a full one-hundred and eighty degrees along the shore of the island and up the road. The space is light and, though chilly in the winter, it’s warm in colour and more full of life than the view outside the windows.
The warm tones in Debra’s work draw me closer as I examine each piece in the room. She explains her process of adding quilting and sewing techniques to her paintings and shows me each of her tools and brushes in great detail.
In the far right corner of the room there are four pieces hanging together which perfectly demonstrate the techniques being described to me. On top of the 3-D brush strokes on the canvases hang gorgeous patterns of thread in even brighter and warmer tones.
One piece becomes reminiscent of a glistening yellow spider web hanging from small branches as the sun sets behind. Another is a garden with beautiful thread vines growing throughout. The textures created by the thread are wonderfully woven and sewn into the foreground, seemingly just sitting atop the canvas.
Each piece has a feeling unique to itself but together Krakow’s work flows into a common theme. Her body of work feels natural, growing, and full of life.
Not all of the pieces are abstractions of nature, though. Many of the works consist of massive, sweeping brush strokes which carry your eye from each corner of the canvas. The artist talks me through the very process of creating these pieces; moving large, wet globs of paint onto a canvas spread on the floor of her studio.
The paint spattered floor shows a history of her process, a timeline of the works created there.
The house, the studio and the artistic family within it were all created by the very same artist. Debra Krakow’s body of work is ever expanding past the walls of her home and her beautiful space.