Curated by Heather McLeese
Presented at the Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Owen Sound, January 10 - March 28, 2020
Installation shots by Alex Fischer
The Gallery gratefully acknowledges support from operational supporters, members, and donors. Thank you to local Owen Sound business Upper Canada Stretchers for supporting The Swirl exhibition. Thanks to the Department of Natural History - Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, for loan of butterfly specimens.
Click here to read an interview that I did with Rob Gowan for The Sun Times about the show.
Essay by Heather McLeese, Curator of Contemporary Art at the TOM:
The Swirl presents contemporary artist Erin Loree and her painterly dialogue with the Tom Thomson Art Gallery’s Collection. In June of 2019, the Gallery invited Loree into the vault to explore and select paintings, artifacts or drawings, that resonated with her for development of a new painting series. Her vault selections gravitate towards notable historic and contemporary landscape masters like Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer, and Emily Carr, as well David Milne, Roly Fenwick and Allen Smutylo. Her contemporary responses, oscillating between representational and abstract, challenge the notion of traditional landscape painting and speak to the mystic forces present in nature.
This exhibition’s title was inspired by an essay written by Roald Nasgaard “Rendering the God-Spirit – Wilderness Landscapes in North America” from Mystical Landscapes: From Vincent van Gogh to Emily Carr, quoting Emily Carr and her profound experience of viewing the Group of Seven paintings and the strong spiritual connections to landscape.
When Emily Carr visited Toronto in November 1927 and first saw the paintings of the Group of Seven, they were a powerful revelation for her, as if they were messengers from an undiscovered world: “I think perhaps I shall find God here, the God I’ve longed and hunted for and failed to find.” Among the members of the group whose work she saw – A.Y. Jackson, J.E.H. MacDonald, Frederick H. Varley, Arthur Lismer, Harris – she was greatly moved by Lismer, who is “swirling, sweeping on,” but even more profoundly by Harris, whose work she describes as “above the swirl” into “serene, uplifted planes, into holy places.” (1)
For Loree, it was Carr’s take on the swirling, spiritual power of the painted landscape harnessed by her contemporaries, that shaped the direction of work in the exhibition. Carr’s divine description of the swirl, allows for multiple interpretations; it can suggest a fifth element, the spirit in nature, an energy or current that connects all living beings to the core elements of earth, water, air and fire. Moving both above and within the swirl itself, Loree’s paintings and drawings demonstrate shifting perspectives and movement between states of being - a journey unique to each viewer.
The monarch butterfly is a prime example of an extraordinary living specimen defying the very odds of survival in Mother Nature. Loree’s curiosity was sparked by the 2009 Nova documentary, The Incredible Journey of Butterflies, that reveals the ambitious, cyclical migratory paths of butterflies. Each winter, monarchs begin their innate swirling flight, travelling thousands of miles from North America to Mexico - truly, an unexplained natural phenomenon. Like a monarch butterfly set with an internal compass whirling through unfamiliar land, Loree boldly renders this natural nomadic pattern, the swirl, with buttery, viscous oil colour.
Loree’s painting practice has always embodied the concept that the act of painting is a process in itself, a journey of discovery. Her explorative relationship between colour and texture define her practice. Each work is guided by the physical gesture of mark-making; using thick, sculptural swirls of oil paint to form emotive layers of meaning, Loree harnesses energy, light and life with each stroke. The Collection works highlight the representational beauty of the Canadian landscape, and Loree channels her energy and vision into her process in response.
For Loree, the swirl is really about a transformation, similar to a mystical experience or a butterfly migration, that takes us from the external world to the internal – ultimately, a journey inward, to the landscapes of the mind.
(1) Nasgaard, Roald, “Rendering the God-Spirit—Wilderness Landscapes in North America”, Mystical Landscapes: From Vincent van Gogh to Emily Carr, Prestel, 2016, pp.254.
Works from the TOM’s collection installed in The Swirl
The Swirl
Oil on canvas over panel
108” x 180”
2019
(sold)
The Swirl was inspired by the North American Monarch’s migration to Mexico every autumn. It is a perilous journey but one of faith and perseverance, as well as the longest known voyage in the insect world. These delicate creatures travel up to 3000 miles, crossing vast mountain ranges, scorching deserts, and large bodies of water with no land in sight. It is a journey against all odds. I knew that the process of making this painting had to reflect the peaks and valleys inherent in the butterflies’ journey. Despite the scale of the work, I didn’t want to plan any aspect of the composition. Instead, each step served as a point of discovery that revealed the next. I, like the monarchs, held a vision of an unknown land and persisted through moments of extreme doubt and hesitation.
The title comes from a conversation Emily Carr had after she first encountered the Group of Seven’s paintings where she described Lismer’s work as “swirling, sweeping on” and Harris’s as “above the swirl” moving into “serene, uplifted planes, into holy places.” Something about the swirl struck a chord in me, but what exactly was the swirl? I saw it as a state of being akin to feeling caught up or swept up in a sort of madness. It’s the madness of being in love, or of struggling with a work of art. It is to be entangled physically or emotionally in something that we are deeply invested in. It is to be in the thick of things, without perspective, and unable to see the forest for the trees. It evokes something in motion, churning, chaotic – an all-consuming, feverish, emotion.
This painting explores the possibility of being above the swirl and in it, simultaneously – chaos existing at one level of reality, and harmony at another – above the swirl. I wanted the painting to embody the process of moving from one state to another, while recognizing they come from the same source. What interests me is the transformation that occurs between the two states and how they give rise to one another through an organic flow of events during the painting process. The only way to rise above the swirl is to let go and allow yourself to be “swept up” in it. The only way out is through.
The Swirl panel was manufactured and installed by local business and Project Sponsor Upper Canada Stretchers in Owen Sound, Ontario.
Meditation and The In-Between
The following two paintings represent the relationship of the inner world to the outer world. They suggest that the inner world – a multi-coloured, multi-dimensional, fluid, ever-changing place – is hidden but always present, below the surface of immediate perception. I often incorporate bright colours in my work as a way to keep things light and playful while dealing with potentially darker subject matter.
Meditation
Oil on panel
50” x 40”
2019
(sold)
The Mind’s Eye.
Penetrating layers, reaching deeper spaces within oneself, illuminating the interior.
What if to move away from the external world and towards one’s centre is to “rise above the swirl?” In my experience, this is the journey toward stillness – the place of infinite possibility, where there is no inner conflict. The deeper you go, the quieter the mind gets. It all falls away. But the only way out is through. First, through the swirl, in order to know its nature.
This painting reminded me of a 10-day silent meditation retreat that I went on 7 years ago. It was the first time I had ever meditated. But, because I didn’t do any research beforehand, I didn’t know what to expect and every moment brought new lessons. During the retreat, we sat in meditation for about ten hours a day. It was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done. We practiced a type of meditation called Vipassana, which means “self-transformation through self-observation.” You sit and sharpen your mind through single-pointed concentration so that you can train your mind to become aware of every sensation – from the subtlest to the grossest – as it arises and passes within the body. You become aware of the impermanent nature of all that exists, experientially, within your own body and mind. As you sit with yourself, confronted with the initial chaos and darkness of the journey inwards, you begin to catch a glimpse…
The In-Between
Oil on panel
50” x 40”
2019
(sold)
The In-Between is the first painting I made after returning from Costa Rica in August after an intense personal journey of healing. I was reading Rudolf Steiner’s book How to Know Higher Worlds and he described the seed meditation as a way to bring the human soul into a conscious relationship with the spiritual dimensions of life:
We place before us a mature plant. First, we immerse ourselves in the thought: “A time will come when this plant will wither and decay. Everything I see will then no longer exist. But the plant will have produced seeds, and these will become new plants. Thus, once again, I become aware that something I cannot see lies hidden in what I can see.”
That same week, a friend’s boyfriend passed away from a brain tumour that had gone undetected until ten months earlier, but that had been growing since birth. When I made this painting, I was thinking about that narrow space between the process of becoming, flourishing, and blossoming, and the process of dying, withering and fading. That in-between state is as thin as a razor’s edge. And I thought of the eternal cycles of life and death and all that magnificent energy that takes new forms and creates new love. Again and again.
Tom Thomson
Lake Scugog, Evening
For me, this oil sketch is emblematic of Tom’s unparalleled ability to capture transient moments of light in painting. Light is a crucial consideration in my work and I’m always trying to express the relationship between light and life – light as a representation of energy and thus, change, transformation, and transcendence. I use various additive and reductive techniques to allow the pigments and veils of colour to interact with the white of the panel, capturing a sense of light that appears to emanate from within the painting. It’s this inner glow that gives the paintings a sense of being alive – reminding me that light is synonymous with life.
Breathing Space and Cosmic Garden:
In this pair of small works, each painting expresses one side of the coin: within and above the swirl.
Breathing Space
Oil and acrylic on panel
12” x 24”
2019
(sold)
Breathing Space draws from Harris’s Pic Island, where the viewer feels as if he or she is above the landscape looking down at it. But even a peaceful and serene landscape is subject to a storm. Dark and ominous clouds creep in from the far right and creating a feeling of tension and unease, implying the fleeting natures of peace and serenity.
Cosmic Garden
Oil and acrylic on panel
12” x 24”
2019
(sold)
Even though Cosmic Garden is such a tiny painting, there is a powerful energy circulating through and around the composition. There is a sense of controlled chaos and flow. In fact, both Breathing Space and Cosmic Garden were painted over top of a matching pair of acrylic underpaintings. I consider the underpainting to be the underlying, unchanging, unifying structure below the surface. It holds everything in place, no matter how “wild” things get. Breathing Space is the bird’s eye view, and Cosmic Garden, the primordial soup from which everything arises.
Ocean Play
Oil on panel
60” x 48”
2016
(sold)
I consider Ocean Play to be the most playful and joyful painting in this series. This painting was made three years ago before I realized just how much the Group’s work had informed mine. Having this piece around set the tone for the whole show (it had been up in my living room for the past year and had crept into my subconscious). Ocean Play is about making the inherently dark and foreboding nature of the swirl (i.e., energy, motion, and transformation, the unknown) feel uplifting, playful, and approachable. The central figure appears to burst upward and outward, signalling an intense freedom that cuts through the horizontal strip of mountains in the background. There is a palpable tension between the dynamic twisting form in the foreground as it’s set against the serene mountains in the background.
Three Mountains
Oil on panel
30” x 40”
2018
(sold)
My work has often centered around concepts of duality, inversion, and the interplay of opposing forces. But around the time I made this painting, I was thinking a lot about the concept of trinity: one, the other, and both.
The number three grew in significance for me and the title refers to the number of mountains that I scraped away after I had taken the painting close to the edge of being overworked. Scraping away the mountains simplified things. I thought it was interesting that when you see a mountain you immediately think of solidity, weight, and groundedness. But what happens when you scrape away its shape, leaving only the traces and stains of previous marks? How does the negative shape of a mountain feel? Can it feel at once light and heavy?
In the center of this painting I see a scene resembling a tropical oasis nestled amongst the mountains and evergreens. To me, these mountains represent the inevitable challenges each of us face as we climb towards the treasures that await us. Interestingly, because these mountains are depicted as negative shapes they feel ephemeral, while the oasis appears substantial and real due to the thick application of paint in that area. This was an interesting inversion that I couldn’t have planned.
On Jungle Time
Oil on panel
20” x 16
2019
(sold)
Lately I’ve been thinking about my relationship to nature and what it means to connect to the landscape in the 21st century. Most of our experiences of the landscape are mediated by technology. Even when we are physically in the landscape, we often see it through the lens of our phones as we simultaneously project ourselves into the future by imagining how others will perceive us in that place. We are catapulted out of the present moment and out of our bodies.
My deepest connections to the natural world have been outside of Canada. In my mid-twenties I bought a one-way ticket to the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest. I spent the first three months at an artist retreat without the internet or a phone. I then took a four-day boat ride up the Amazon River to a healing centre deep in the lowland jungle where I spent 30 days without running water, electricity or toilets. It was in that dense, mysterious place that I began to strip away all the aspects of my identity and who I thought I was. Without any distractions and anyone or anything to reflect all the beliefs I held about myself, I was given an opportunity to begin again and to write a new story. It was a profoundly transformative experience.
The title On Jungle Time is my take on the saying “on island time.” It refers to the pace of living and also one’s attitude about the clock. Time slows down when we slow down regardless of place (and although that seems to happen most often in nature, it’s not so different from being ‘on studio time’).
Drawings:
South African artist William Kentridge speaks about the uncertainty of images and how this view is much closer to how the world actually is and functions. There’s a provisionality to it. He explains that you can see the world as a series of facts or photographs, or you can see it as a process of unfolding. Both Kentridge and Philip Guston (another one of my art heroes) emphasize the importance of erasure in their work - erasure as building, as constructing – and that the wiping out of an image is just as important as getting one down.
When I transitioned from realistic figurative drawing to process-based, abstract painting, I gave up drawing altogether. Drawing was where I had felt at home but I knew that I had to let that part of me go in order to move forward. These are the first drawings that I’ve made in ten years, and they are the first I’ve made without a reference or a plan since early childhood. The process felt more like painting than I anticipated – it was messy, done with my hands, and felt extremely primal (similar to the feeling of working with clay).
Sliver
Collage, charcoal, graphite, pastel on paper (framed)
30” x 22”
2019
Inquire about this work
In this experimental drawing I explored various ways of applying and working with charcoal, graphite and pastel. I drew, wiped away, smudged, sprayed with water, and collaged sections of a failed drawing onto it. The heavy black outlines in the collaged sections create a playful and graphic quality which felt fresh and exciting.
I was thinking about how powerful a glimmer (or a sliver) of light can be in the midst of a storm. When I consider what it means to be “above the swirl” and “within the swirl” I always relate these two states to lightness and darkness. These seemingly opposing states give rise to one another and cannot exist without each other. They reveal each other to each other.
Tree Spell
Charcoal and pastel on paper (framed)
30” x 22”
2019
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When I was in Peru, I walked by the same tree stump on my way to the stream every day for an entire month. I always noticed its strange and mystical aura and after a while I began to project feelings and moods onto it. It had curly ferns and other strange plants growing out of it like wild hair. It felt magical and otherworldly and reminded me of FernGully: The Last Rainforest – a movie I watched on repeat as a child. The image stuck with me and as soon as I saw Lismer’s drawing of a tree stump, I felt compelled to create my own. In this piece, the stump feels animated but also as if it’s fading away or disintegrating. There are also marks that suggest smoke or a magical spell swirling around the tree. I wanted to create a lot of drama in this piece, hence the vignette and the high contrast of lights and darks.
Forest Light
Charcoal on paper (framed)
30” x 22”
2019
Inquire about this work
Forest Light is a subtle drawing. I deliberately refrained from using much black so that it would feel softer and dreamier. There’s a sense of shimmering golden light pouring through the forest, illuminating the forms below. Even though the work is monochromatic, there’s a warmth in the atmosphere and it’s uncertain whether it’s early morning or late in the day.
Even though the sun is black, it shines bright light onto the scene. To me this suggests that nothing is inherently negative or positive. Light is often born out of darkness.
Tools + Tom Thomson’s Palette and Painting Mug
Tools are evidence of process. They are messy, unapologetic, and provide a glimpse into the artist’s process. I see them as honest, unconventional and unintentional self-portraits. The artist’s shifting moods are embedded in the material, encrusted in paint and muddied colours. Each tool is an accumulation (or culmination) of incalculable hours and countless works. They remind us that painting is a language, that material holds meaning, and that painters often think in paint.
The Collection
My selection from the vault includes some of my favourite artists whose work I already had a deep affinity for, and others whose work I wasn’t familiar with. I had a specific set of criteria in mind before selecting the pieces: either the work’s title needed to align with the metaphor of the journey from darkness to light, or, visually, I was looking for individual pieces or groupings of works that depicted passageways, moments of transition, or that captured a sense of chaos and stillness at same time either through imagery or application of paint. My intention was to create a dialogue between the works in the Collection and the big painting that mirrored them across the room. The Collection works represent fragments of a larger whole, each contributing an individual perspective and expression. Each piece reflects a different aspect of The Swirl and represents a slice of the journey moving from within it, through it, to above it.
