When you look at an artwork and can’t be sure if it’s a painting or a photograph, then on closer examination realize it is in fact a painting, you can marvel at both the artist’s skill and appreciate the playful trickery. That’s certainly the case with the works by painter and photographer Caroline Weaver in her new show at The Kube in Gibsons, entitled Neon Brown.
The work is even more impressive when you learn that Weaver, who grew up in Port Coquitlam and has lived on the Sunshine Coast for most of the past seven years, has had exhibits in Vancouver and across the U.S., and yet has had no formal art training.
“I just took art classes in high school,” Weaver said in an interview at the gallery July 12. “I started drawing again and teaching myself painting in my 20s.”
While some of Weaver’s works in the exhibit are floridly nature-inspired, a few others stand out for their photographic realism, rendered from photos she staged, as it turns out, from memory. Prominent in that style are the oil paintings The Spot, featuring discarded Double Bubble gum wrappers, and Don’t Tell, with its giant close-up of spent Dad’s root beer bottle tops. They’re both finely executed pieces, but why the quirky choice of subject matter? It’s about youth, she suggests, and is inspired by a few randomly retained images from that time in her life.
“It’s about teenage interactions, behind the school. The little places that you go with your friends after class,” she said. “The Spot, that’s from the spot where you all hang out.”
Weaver’s Neon Brown is on at The Kube through the first week of August.
