The first exhibition of a newly formed Sunshine Coast artist collective took place last weekend, just steps from the crowded curbs of Sechelt’s Cowrie Street during the annual downtown Show & Shine.
For the five members of the Mission Point Artists who hosted the all-day showcase at Rockwood Lodge — Tammy Hartman, Wendy Charters, Kathryn Poole, Donna Arvidson and Jeanne Robinson —, the occasional rumble was nothing new. On Feb. 21, a 5.1-magnitude earthquake rattled Mission Point House while their full cohort of 10 artists was at work. After they lunged for the doors, the shaking stopped. The painters assessed the condition of the historic cottage (still upright) and picked up where they left off.
The all-women group was formed last autumn and meets twice monthly.
“We’re experiencing really lovely things together as a painting group,” said Charters. “We thought: let’s do a show that’s not the Art Crawl, because not everybody wanted to do the Art Crawl this year. Then I remembered the 7,000 people in the Coast Reporter’s photograph that shows who attended the car show, and I thought: at least we’ll have a numbers game if we do it this weekend.”
Charters’s acrylic works depict bucolic Sunshine Coast scenes not far from the group’s Mission Point headquarters. In Summer Trail, shafts of sunlight angle between the evergreens that line Chapman Creek. Classic workboats congregate in Gibsons Harbour in Retired Tugboat Rendezvous, their thicket of masts and a sharp contrast to the brooding clouds above. A self-portrait — painted from a 1972 snapshot of Chaters surfacing at Cat Lake — evokes summertime ebullience.
“Rediscovering my own child-like joy of playing in imagery came late and as a surprise,” said Charters. “I blame Coastal life with its endless source of beauty, creativity and delight — in nature as well as human nature — all of which capture my imagination.”
Bodies of water are also a source of fascination for Donna Arvidson, who moved to the Coast in 2022 after retiring from her career as an executive coach. “My work is inspired by the beauty in our natural world,” she said, “the endless variety in shapes, colours and light, the emotions, nostalgia, and longing.”
Arvidson’s acrylic works use strong colours to depict the prairies around her original hometown of Calgary (as in After the Rain, where a flatlands pond reflects a jet-blue sky) as well as more distant locales (in Ellesmeer Island Magic, icebergs are suspended in the watery firmament, with distant, dark headlands anchoring the seascape).
Works by Kathryn Poole also include moody landscapes (Walking at Dusk provides a study in twilight blues that dapple a stand of birches) plus wildlife studies. In Harvey, a bear reclines on its side, contemplating the viewer — she also painted Tex, the ill-fated grizzly from Texada Island. Sated shows a wolf, his head resting on a fallen log, contentedly ruminating after a hearty meal. Poole’s Blind Contours series are whimsical portraits whose contours are drawn while averting her eyes; Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring and Holbein’s portrait of a paunchy Tudor regent both undergo Picasso-like distortions.
Jeanne Robinson’s large-scale landscapes — primarily in oils — have emerged over the last decade, since retirement from a career in law. “As I paint, I try to recall and enhance an emotional experience I have had in nature,” she said, “and express it to others in my paintings.” Her seductively undulating diptych Eucalyptus Trees depicts the Athenian countryside near Socrates’s onetime abode. Riverside Larch & Ponderosa shows a BC Interior valley at its most iridescent: the aureate larches echo tawny hillside beyond a meandering oxbow.
The paintings of Tammy Hartman — who studied with local artist Ed Hill after retiring to Gibsons — are usually accompanied by original written reflections. “Each piece has a story,” she said. “Without it, the painting is incomplete. It is the story that provides the meaning and impetus for each painting.”
The tangled boughs of a forest grove in Chaos and Order offer a reminder that nothing is by chance. Weatherbeaten pilings evoke a paddling trip down the Harrison River, suggesting the timeless presence of the region’s Chehalis First Nation.
For her umber-hued image of totems on the Sechelt foreshore (Guardians), she turned from prose to poetry: “These totems safeguard / stories sometimes told, but not heard.”
Other members (and future exhibitors) of the Mission Point Artists are Debra Nelson, Diane Nyberg, Gwen Gingerich, Lori Morris and Dana Brash.
