Landscapes are not the style of painting that the Coast's art public associates with Roberts Creek artist Maurice Spira. His work, which spans a 40-year career, is usually politically tinged or allegorical. His figurative work is realistic and often grotesque.
But there is another side of Spira - the man who is refreshed by the immediacy of painting en plein air (outdoors, on site). His latest show, to open at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre on May 28, is called simply Landscapes, 20 paintings of local scenes with an industrial theme. Painting outdoors is a choice of style Spira began 30 years ago in the desert of Mexico with an artist mentor, and he continued the practice while living by the waterfront in Vancouver in the mid '70s. Eventually, he put it aside in order to develop his printmaking and portraiture. In 2005, when the life drawing sessions at the Arts Centre ended for the summer, he and two other local artists decided to take their studios out to nature.
"I was never tempted to go to the beach and reproduce what a veritable army of landscape painters have done," he said. Instead, the majority of the paintings are completed on site near Port Mellon or by the gravel conveyor belt in Selma Park, and they depict scenes of industry. Each landscape is marked by the tracks of human labour: a working barge in Howe Sound piled with wood chips, a log boom swelling in the tide, heavy machinery at rest, the mill belching clouds of vapour into the sky.
"I'm interested in human labour from a political point of view, particularly the forest industry in its coastal manifestation," he said.
Fishing boats in the marina are also attractive, but as Spira points out, it has been done.
Does this new series have a political agenda? No, he said, these paintings are not ideologically driven. On examination, the viewer can see that he's correct. What leaps out from these paintings is not so much the massive machines but the unpredictable weather. Capturing the immediacy of painting en plein air the artist becomes acutely aware of the environment. The group will paint even when showers threaten or clouds menace. He describes having to lash the canvas to the easel to keep the wind from blowing it into the salt chuck. The conflict is revealed in the painting - the weather grabs the attention.
"Each painting is really a composite of the first five minutes after you set up," he said.
After that, the sun can go in and out, anything can happen over the three hours until completion. It requires basic classical skills.
"My training was traditional. If you can't draw, you can't do this," he remarks.
Many landscape painters take photographs on site and then copy slavishly at home in the studio, a process that Spira dislikes. En plein air involves a direct, living relationship with nature, he points out - nature is not mediated by the iris of the camera.
"I want a living transmission; I want my rods and cones to bring those images in. I want to analyze and interpret it in an expressive manner," he said, adding that the experience is hugely enjoyable for him. "It's become an addiction."
Some of his new work can be seen at www.mauricespira.com. The show opens on Wednesday, May 28, with a reception from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Doris Crowston Gallery of the Arts Centre in Sechelt and runs until June 15. Artist Kathleen Barrett shares the gallery to exhibit her spontaneous expressions rendered in acrylic art, entitled Paint.
