Top British landscape TV hit gets a fresh coat of Canadian paint
Credit to Author: Dana Gee| Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2020 16:00:05 +0000
Premiere: Sunday, Feb. 16, 8 p.m.
Makeful (pay channel)
The new TV show Landscape Artist of the Year Canada has done a pretty good job when it comes to creating a reproduction of the U.K.’s Sky Arts TV show Landscape Artist of the Year.
The Canadian version that is set to take a bow on Feb. 16 at 9 p.m. on the Makeful channel has pulled together a combination of 18 professional and amateur artists for the non-scripted competition series.
“Nearly 400 people applied across the country,” said the Canadian showrunner Carly Spencer via email. “We were so pleasantly surprised as a first-season show having that much interest and high-quality art. The artists were diverse and their artwork was diverse. There is such a thriving art community across the country with real talent.”
In the series, artists are taken to beautiful spots, set up in outdoor (en plein air, in art-speak) mini studios, pointed in a given direction and told to create a landscape in four hours.
“How did I cope with the four hours?” said a laughing Vancouver’s Laura Zerebeski, who brings her impressionistic/expressionist style to the first episode of the series set on a bucolic farm. “The image that kept coming into my mind was the fish from Finding Dory, just keep going, just keep swimming, just keep swimming. So that was my motto — just keep painting.”
Kylee Turunen of Port Alberni was also in the four-hours-flies-by camp.
Port Alberni’s Kylee Turunen puts her abstract realism painting skills to the test in the new Wakeful channel TV show Landscape Artist of the Year Canada.
“It took me by surprise. I usually consider myself a fast painter and I was thinking I would have more than enough time, but it didn’t seem like enough time for me actually in the end,” said Turunen, who has been a professional painter for seven years. “I kind of had to rush it in the end.”
Turunen, along with Zerebeski and Jeff Wilson of Vancouver, make up the B.C. contingent in the field.
For the first three episodes, the painters are divided into groups of six. At the end of each episode (shot in Ontario locations) two painters are chosen to advance to the final round.
If you have not seen the British show, it’s worth pointing out this isn’t a show just for artists and those who know the difference between Art Basel and Art Garfunkel. It’s really a show about witnessing creativity in real time. Watching a painting come to life is both awe-inspiring and, frankly, a bit envy inducing.
“No, that’s the beautiful thing about the show. It brings art to an audience in a really accessible way,” said Spencer. “The beauty of this show is that all of the competitors start with a blank canvas and we get to see their entire process from the tools they use and the messaging behind the work.
“It’s giving access into a world people don’t normally get to see when they’re not artists. It’s so incredible to see a blank canvas go to a finished piece of work in four hours.”
Also, it’s really eye opening to see how artists looking at similar vistas can deliver such different finished products.
Guiding the viewers through the show is host Sook-Yin Lee and judges Marc Mayer, former National Gallery of Canada director, and artist and educator Joanne Tod. The three wander the makeshift studios talking with the artists as they work. Questions about paint, process, choices and even career aspirations are asked and answered.
There is a lot of chitchat, something many artists do not do while creating.
“It’s definitely different than what I am used to. I usually listen to music while I paint in my studio,” said Turunen, who describes her style as abstract realism. “It’s a bit distracting to have to paint and talk at the same time. It is a bit difficult to do.
“Painting takes a lot of thought. It is not just something that is in your subconscious,” added Turunen. “It takes a lot to think about what you are doing on the canvas.”
For Vancouver’s Wilson, who joins Turunen in Episode 3 at the Midland docks on Georgian Bay, the fast pace and constant conversation didn’t cause concern. For him it was the on-location part of the equation that gave the biologist turned professional painter a bit of a pause.
“I am accustom to painting to a time frame. I do all kinds of demos at local art stores for one-and-a-half to two hours, also other competitive events in Vancouver. But I’m not a super-experienced plein air painter, so it was a challenge,” said Wilson, who immigrated to Canada from Scotland in 2004. “The main challenge was that the light changes from one part of the day to the next, so it changes the colours that you work with.”
Vancouver’s Jeff Wilson hopes to be the winner of the new Wakeful channel TV competition series Landscape Artist of the Year Canada.
After the “long day,” Wilson, who paints in collections, said he was happy with both his work and the experience. And he even learned a little something about his own skills.
“Well, I’m not quite as bad at plein air as I thought I was. That was good,” said Wilson. “It was great.”
For Turunen, the big takeaway was similar to Wilson’s.
“I think I learned I would like to paint more out in plein air,” she said. “I feel it would really help my career to explore that more because I am used to painting in one way and I kind of want to branch out and try different kinds of painting.”
The artists, ranging in age from their early 20’s to 70’s, found their way to the show through submitting their work online. From there, a panel of art critics made their picks.
“It was really interesting because a lot of the time it was quite unanimous,” said Spencer. “They were looking for pieces that were beautiful, innovative, spoke to the Canadian identity and generally just interesting landscapes. Always pushing the boundaries of what landscape art can be. It’s a genre that continues to evolve.”
At the end of a very long day, the artists from B.C. agreed it was a wonderful experience.
“I think I was nervous. The one thing you have to do is the hard thing,” said Zerebeski who left a corporate gig for full-time art in 2008. “You have to challenge yourself, and I think artists kind of do that.”
In this case, yes, they really prove that to be true.
CLICK HERE to report a typo.
Is there more to this story? We’d like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. Email vantips@postmedia.com.