I want to take a moment to thank you for your unwavering support, kindness, and connection. There is much to take your time and attention in these days of rising uncertainty. Thank you for your generosity in choosing to read this slender offering.

I am opening this letter with the painting “A Light Exists In Spring” because it not only reflects for me the season but more explicitly a season of our experience of being. We all recognize the signs; the surge of colour and blossoms, the pungent aroma of warmed earth, the newness of the light, the shock of it, a brightness unfamiliar, almost painful after winter’s brooding and introspective skies. The seeds of these new paintings have been germinating for a long time. In the arc of my apprenticeship to this rich art, I feel growth in these works, a new freedom of line and gesture, a further quality of expressiveness, a voice alive to the new.

Spring is alive and brings us alive. It is a riot of bloom and beginnings, unpredictable, uncontrollable, exciting and emergent. In the torrent and rush of growth unfurling as it does from a season of contraction, I pay attention to how I have been in the studio creating new paintings that seem bent on resisting the dark. There is much darkness and chaos surrounding us and yet in my work and in my days on earth I feel it important to find ways to resist. These paintings are sparks to light the dark.

I have been reading the poet Louise Glück. Her voice is sober yet feels like a light by which to navigate. 

Look here, an excerpt from the poem “October” in the collection Averno:

“It is true there is not enough beauty in the world.

It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.

Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.”

With these paintings I hope to bring some of this candor, a directness, a rawness that includes both the difficult nature and the resounding brightness of the world.

My wish for you is to find inner strength and resilience in this time of change.

When faced with encroaching chaos, the war raging just 30 miles from his beloved county home, Monet said: “I shall stay here regardless, and if those barbarians wish to kill me, I shall die among my canvases, in front of my life’s work.”

I began these watery paintings intuitively, not thinking of Monet but of the power of water to transform. One cannot paint waterlilies however, without Monet appearing. We are here to help each other on our way. Sometimes those that take our hand do so from the other world.

I like to walk by the ponds with the lilies. At this time of year there are not yet flowers, only the dark waters and the muck— but I need to remember their small bright flames.

I recall too, how humans, living in the closest proximity to destruction and violence have been long tuned to the beauty of generative nature, the tending of plants and gardens as an act of resistence. Creative acts of nurturance, be it painting or gardening or loving have long been intertwined with our human history of violence.

Find your consolations. Open your hands. We must be generous, we must bring our light.

With gratitude and many thanks to all of you for being here, your support and encouragement is invaluable to me.

Warmly,

Gab

This was a summer unlike others. It began with the excitement of the invitation to participate in Monica Reyes Gallery’s Summer Group Exhibition: Island Hopping (Gallery Artists and Guests) July, 2024. This was a great honour. The work pictured above; “Summer Sonata” was included and is now available to purchase, please contact the gallery for details.

Summer is often remembered for its sense of innocence and play. A season filled with sun drenched idylls of romance coupled with coming of age stories steeped in nostalgia and the occasional languid dive into a good beach read; refreshing, cool and placid as the waters of a welcoming lake. This was not my summer of ‘24.

It was however a summer of deep contemplation and reading. I read fiction, non fiction and the necessary reading between the lines when met with the narrative of change and transformation that composes a life, a history, a family fiction. I was navigating with my sister the trail of detritus and treasure left in the wake of a major transition. It was and continues to be a rite of passage.

It is both a privilege and a presentiment of mortality to dissolve the home of your parents. Even more so because they are not dead, simply moving closer to their last days on earth.

You might think that this is a strange topic for a newsletter devoted to sharing pieces of my journey as an artist, yet I feel it is central. My work of late centers on thinking about gardens, cultivating spaces of refuge, tending to an idea of paradise. We all, at one season of our lives or another, wrestle with irreparable loss. Loss itself is a season, returned to us with cyclical regularity. Loss is as intimately connected to joy as to destruction, potential as to decay. What withers is both source of regeneration and as tightly bound to loss as heartbreak is to love. We all are shattered and suffer. To be cast out of paradise is not only a parable in an ancient text but part of our vital and contemporary lives, to be enacted over and again in all the ways we find ourselves in exile to own being, to our community or to the rest of humanity. Expulsion from paradise is an invitation to tend the wound, to attend to the garden you have been given.

My current paintings and collage constructions address the experiences of the passage of time and loss through multiple approaches—remembrance, memorialization, and transformation. In the collages below you can recognize remnants of other artists’ work, re-imagined, re-conceptualized and reorganized into new forms. Imagined gardens and skeins of energy untethered from figuration here coalescing into abstracted elements both familiar yet strange.

SUMMER READING

In my last newsletter I said this about my collages: “Collage is like our complex, fragmented, cut-up and ruptured contemporary culture. Making sense of disparate parts, seeing connections, re-contextualizing, reparative re-mixing and making poetry from pieces is how I think of my collages.”

I think I read with similar collage-like tendencies…I like to draw from many disparate sources to build pictures in mind and heart that value difference and challenge my own preconceptions. In this stack of books you can meander from an art historical detective novel, through a dark and moving parable involving a wild girl who encounters a self-exiled hunter, to life lessons from a Buddhist painter poet, to a hilarious and whip smart investigation into New York’s Contemporary Art Scene.

From there, two more mystery novels, one set among the dead, melancholic and yet ebullient, both celebrating art, friendship life and love…keep moving to share an 80 year old man’s life long passion for running, then a queer writer’s inquiry into how creatives keep doing what they do for “the long run”

and finally “The Garden Against Time, In Search of a Common Paradise”, worth reading with all the deep attention and intimate care needed to nurture a garden.

This book by Olivia Laing is an exciting investigation into a question crucial for our age: “Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there’s still time?”

Her wide ranging text centers the garden

“not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery,”

and importantly for me, talks about the story of humanity’s expulsion from paradise as a necessary exploration of freedom.

Reading is for me both solace and provocation.

Do you read? To where do you turn for an encounter with the new?

I have always loved this painting (above left) “Expulsion From Paradise” by the Renaissance artist Massacio. It is so rich with feeling. Massacio, through the simple dignity of these naked forms, expresses the fundamental nature of the human condition. Our time is brief, everything changes, we suffer.

In this my summer of 2024, I had to bear witness to the extreme anguish of my parents as they lived in their 90th and 92nd year the difficulty of leaving their personal Eden. Many of us have experienced banishment, many in today’s world are continued to be denied the enchantments and plenitudes of the few, each of us suffers separation and loss. As Olivia Laing says:

“Many people have lost a paradise, and even if they haven’t the story of the lost paradise continues to resonate because nearly all of us have lost or relinquished or else forgotten the paradise of a child’s perception, when the world is so new and generous in its astonishments, let alone the sweet, fruitful paradise of first love, when the body itself becomes the garden. Perhaps this is why literature is so crammed with secular versions of the Eden story: gardens that open unexpectedly and are then locked, a paradise that is stumbled upon and can never be found again…”

I am leaving you with an image of another of my favourite paintings, this one by the American Joan Mitchell. In the early 80’s Mitchell made a series of paintings titled “La Grande Vallee”. She was mourning, her sister had just died and she found herself at a creative impasse, unable to paint. Her good friend the pianist Gisele Barreau, also mourning the death of her cousin, shared a story that impacted Mitchell with deep resonance. The cousin as he was dying recollected his wish to return to a pastoral and secluded valley of his youth, a place visited only as a child with Gisele who would bring him to this refuge. Mitchell recounts him saying “if only we could return to the Grande Vallee once again”.

As the writer Max Horowitz says in his essay contribution to the Joan Mitchell catalogue; “This tale with its conjuring of an innocent and idyllic past and its poignant charge of irrevocable loss offered Mitchell a way to reapproach painting while contending with her sister’s death.”

It is in contending with our own inevitable losses, humiliations and defeats that we discover our resilience, in turning toward the source of our exile, the very paradise of our former unity, we uncover resources beneath despair and there find rebirth. Each of us must ask of ourselves; “how do I carry on?”

I am looking forward to my return to the studio to paint. I feel inspired and richly rewarded by this summer, at once elegiac and ebullient, like this magnificent painting of Mitchell’s.

With gratitude and many thanks to all of you for being here, your support and encouragement is invaluable to me.

Warmly, 

Gabryel

I am a bit late, a step behind the first burst of Spring’s wild energy. Gardens already are greening and alive with colour. You may be even now, tending to your own garden, nurturing and noticing, kneeling in the still cool soil to look more closely at the alien pink shoots of the peony.

Gardens are a long time. They are of Kairos, the time of cycles, not the time of clocks. In my last letter I spoke of making a series of works that represented a “caesura”, a pause to reflect, a gathering inward or a time for rest and regeneration. I was experiencing a kind of interior winter. In tune with the season itself, time slowed, grew dark. With the return of light and the quickening vigour of the earth in its bloom, Spring has returned me to my own vitality. Like moon or tides, I find my rhythm of creative energy waxes and wanes, yet the inner cycle never ceases in its turning. I have come to trust, that like a weed shouldering its way through a sidewalk crack to find the light, I too emerge from the lean and fallow with a will to thrive and reach. The light of a new idea, a new life, project or enterprise is best nurtured in the shelter of patient attendance before it will germinate and find its natural emergence.

Each tender shoot begins in darkness. From this grounded place of deeply rooted strength, your offering and mine, arises.

In the studio I find ways to work with this rhythm. I change media, work in a different scale, experiment without need to produce a finished piece, read, contemplate, begin again.

I believe in the necessity of losing one’s way. I want to be changed, enlarged and expanded. In relationship to others or to my paintings, experience has taught me that my best self, like my best works, arrive like Dante’s pilgrim at a passage liken to a “dark wood”. It is here where I must have the courage to stay present with the chaos, the unknown and unresolved. It is to this “lost” work, I must abandon myself. It is only here that I may receive the grace of something new coming into being, each layer of the painting hiding and revealing, each act of loss anticipating what I have yet been able to conceive.

We all live with time and its passing. I like to think that the moment of our greatest aliveness is to be able to live in the gap with our full attention. We all must face disappearance. It is our natural inheritance as brilliant and innately creative beings to embrace the complex tension between dissolution and arrival.

TIME…. away from the studio, your job or any regular routine can be just the shift in attention needed to provide a fresh insight or approach. I had this opportunity most recently when visiting Auckland, NZ. It was there, visiting the Auckland Art Gallery that I was gifted the opportunity to see the original Fantin LaTour painting “Roses”. I love this work and it has seeped into many of the rose portraits I have myself previously painted. These new paintings shown below are filled with the memory of that experience. Though entirely unalike in intention, in gesture, medium and in paint handling, I still feel, like the lingering musk of a particularly fragrant rose, that the essence of LaTour’s intense connection to his subject surfaces in the mad delight and freedom of mark making expressed in this series of paintings.

In reviewing one of my favorite books “Earth Recitals, Essays On Image and Vision”, by Melissa Kwasny, Robert Baker asks the questions:

“What is it to see? What is it to create an image? What is it to live in a way that opens the heart and the mind to vision?”

This painting of Fantin LaTour’s opens my heart to the freedom of making my own mark. Seeing deeply into this one painting, feeling intently into the essence of life unfolding through deep time within the life of this one rose, one encounter, I discover that inhabiting the integrity of the gesture I make, is the only true mark only I can make. My gesture, my intonation, and therefore by implication, your gesture, your mark, your creative response to the world opens to and celebrates the unrepeatable, the uniqueness of your own vision, your one unrepeatable life.

I was recently invited to participate in an ongoing portrait project by the artist Mark Mizgala. 

In his words: In this series, I invite artists to create small paintings on a sheet of glass. I then mount the prepared glass to the front of my camera lens and make portraits. Shooting through the artwork, plays of transparency and diffusion interact with the figures. My process involves collaboration, experimentation and a good measure of luck.

With gratitude and many thanks to all of you for being here, your support and encouragement is invaluable to me.

Warmly, 

Gabryel

Each November—for 27 years and counting—the Eastside Arts Society [EAS] has produced the Eastside Culture Crawl Visual Arts, Design & Craft Festival, in which artists in Vancouver’s Eastside open their studios to the public. The event is focused on the area bounded by Columbia St., 2nd Ave., Victoria Dr., and the Waterfront, and involves painters, jewellers, sculptors, furniture makers, weavers, potters, printmakers, photographers, glassblowers— ranging from emerging artists to those internationally established.

This open artist studio event, along with workshops, demonstrations exhibits and artist talks, increases understanding and appreciation of the many varied visual art practices in our cities Eastside. The Crawl, as it is affectionately known, is an accessible and fun experience for art lovers and first time visitors alike.

Why should you care? In our ever increasingly complex world where AI and corporations compete for your attention every minute of the day, where you are constantly the target of attention-grabbing, behavior-modifying algorithms, choosing to be in direct relation to others and the physical world rather than the device in your hand can be a radical act of self-determination. We are all creatives. Our world, and the arc of each life necessitates reinvention. You, like a practicing artist, make creative choices everyday. Come out and talk to some of these artists in their studios, see their works of imagination that may stretch your own, smell oil paint and leather, watch molten glass being blown into transparent globes, engage all your senses while exploring a neighbourhood or studio new to you. Creativity is Homo Sapiens superpower. Give yourself the gift of touching into your own deep well by bringing openness and curiosity.

I love this statement of the artist Yayoi Kusama, “My wish for you is to explore yourself, and find a marvellous view”.

This is my wish for you too! and I look forward to hosting you.

Working with gouache, ink, oil crayon and pencil on collaged surfaces of pasted papers, I mix various ephemera and mark making, embracing chance and randomness in my search for new meanings while balancing compositions of distillation and essence.

In these collages I am using mixed media to create a new synthesis of abstracted elements, original and found text, drawings, plant material, shape, colour and texture to make poetic juxtapositions in a simplified small scale format.

Abstract Expressionist artist Robert Motherwell called paper the most “sympathetic of all painting surfaces,” remarking that “it’s a struggle to get a canvas to have the beautiful surface that paper, by nature, already has.”

I agree with Motherwell, and love to work on paper. This love began as a child with ink and dip pens, a love that as time went on, graduated to expensive fountain pens and beautiful handmade papers. Paper is for me playful and experimental, an opportunity to discover new spatial relationships and compostions with ephemera of the found and everyday.

In my collages I like to use the suggestive potentials of differences in materials, blending the accidental and the intentional in the creative gesture, whether a stroke of the pen or the brush or a tear of paper. As a lover of poetry, I sometimes incorporate fragments of language and poetic texts.

My Culture Crawl exhibit for 2023 will also include new paintings, such as this one, from my continuing abstraction of the landscape series.

I heard the water before seeing its flow cascading down black stepped granite. Water continually renews and recycles as it falls into the basin at the foundation of Frank Gehry’s stunning chrysalis of a building, the Louis Vuitton Foundation. This magnificent museum and gallery is situated between woods and gardens, on the edge of the Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris. With the flowing water and ever changing light appearing to float the transparent structure, Gehry’s building of crystal sails seems to skim through the trees.

Exhibition Announcement

Gifts arrive mysteriously as breath. Without paying any particular attention we receive the singular gift of life many hundreds of times each day and yet, without awareness of the preciousness of this gift, the fullness of our life may remain unopened.

I think of this as the year turns toward the season of giving. I am feeling gratitude for all those artists who inspire me, those who have gone before me and those in this day, my artist friends and contemporaries. Each painter, poet or conceptualist works with or without recognition, to wrest from the raw materials of unknowing and uncertainty an offering of fragile beauty.

Lyric Shards - "Carry On the Light" came to me after the quiet contemplation of two separate gifts recently received. The first gift was an invitation, one which I initially thought was not for me. Michal Tkachenko invited me to participate in the inaugural exhibition of Gallery Modicum, Studio 480 during this year's Culture Crawl, November 17-20, 2022.

"No thanks, I couldn't possibly...my work is not the right size/fit...the time frame is too short....Blah, Blah, Blah...we've all said it, thought it... said no to the difficult invitation. Yet I felt prompted to deeper consideration by the annoying and insistent voice within asking "But what is the world asking of you?"

And so comes forth the mystery of creation, the ability to stay in uncertainty. While the mind is uneasy and wrestling with doubt, a deeper ground of meaning, an expanded possibility is hovering just on the edge of our old, more limited perception. Here exists a deeper awareness waiting for all of us who risk more in the desire to further open our minds.

In this moment of pause a second gift arrived. It came with my friend, the artist Dana Wysewho when visiting from her home in Paris gave me an old ledger, its gossamer pages filled with beautifully inked cursive. I felt the touch of an unknown hand reaching across a century, on paper thin as the skin of an elder. Tender. Asking for touch in return.

This is the way of gifts. True surrender to their enigmatic entering into our lives, whether first perceived as unwelcome or generously invited, asks us to give of ourselves. What will I do with these gifts?

We may think the gift asks more of us than we have to offer, but the gift is asking for us to look more deeply, to discover what we have yet to know, experience or understand. The gift asks us to be braver.

I was being asked to work on a completly new scale, in a modicum of space and time. This appealed to me. I love the compression of image and meaning held in a poem of elegant architecture. I love to work with text, I love the fragmentary, the obscured and forgotten as well as the suggestion of a relic unearthed. This old text gains new life in a new century, linking me, and you the viewer to another soul across time.

I felt the breath of inspiration stir and waken.

They say gifts come in threes. The title "Carry On The Light" refers to the work of artist Lawrence Carroll. I am here paying homage to Carroll, recently deceased, and to the influence that the beauty of his work has had on me. I share his belief that nothing is ever truly exhausted, that ideas can continually be given new form and meaning. I wanted to pay tribute to his life and work, to offer this painting as a gift in his memory. I see that our work has correspondences, I wanted to carry on the light.

Lyric Shards extends my former investigations into text based work using the medium of gypsum and beeswax on board with original or found text, yet in miniature. Using a heat source of lamp or gun, I melt and fuse aromatic beeswax with these tissue thin pages in a ritual gesture of healing. I intentionally employ the triptych style to suggest paintings from a time when works of art were commonly used for altarpieces or more simply, for private devotions. It is not the sanctity of the subject matter in some of those historical religious paintings that endures in my mind and to which I return, but to the quality of light and quietude, to the prevailing sense of serenity.

I wanted to ask this of my painting. I wanted a quietness of palette, a sense of light and a generous spaciousness paradoxically contained in a rectangle hardly bigger than a postcard.
It seems to me that even in our century of haste and crowd, we want to slow down, we seek the silence of a cathedral grove, fresh powder or alpine meadow as balm for our buffeted souls. I wanted to make a salve for the modern wound. To offer a tiny antidote to rush and grandiose, to give of my attention to the lost voice, to uphold the tender gesture and perhaps to achieve a "modicum" of respite in a tubulent world.

I see these pieces as a coming together of disparate elements from across time and space into new formations of quiet contemplation. In a century of noise and distraction, I want to reconnect to the essence of stillness and to a sense of the sacred in the everyday touch of the world.

The gift is like a door which opens with the courage of our first step.

“gift revives the soul.”

― Lewis Hyde, from The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

“A painting, you know, it's all dirty material. But it's about transformation. Taking that earth, that heavy earthen kind of thing, turning it into air and light.” “A work of art is a renewable source of energy.”

- Brice Marden

“We cannot, of course, save the World because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone's calling, to lead a life that helps.”
  - Barry Lopez

In this new series “Earth Recitals”, I want to invite you into the essence of the experience of being in nature. I want to invite you to participate in the sensate beauty of the world around us with the hope that it inspires others to "lead a life that helps". I offer these paintings in service to the world we want to live in and wish to leave behind us.

I had the recent good fortune to spend some time with my partner and friends on the Sunshine Coast. I walked out into the freshness of a Spring day to encounter blustery winds carrying the mineral tang and salt of the sea snatching at the limbs of trees silvered by storms. I scrambled over cedar and pine, roots twisted and intertwined on rocky moss covered clefts. Close to these elementals of earth, water, air and light I felt richly enlivened, wholly part, as one who shares in the material fabric of this mysterious yet earthy web of our miraculous biosphere. The Diptych pictured below is a direct response to that day.

When making these paintings, I intentionally build and work the surface with many layers and marks, adding, scraping, excavating to find balance and to create a certain tension to hold power in the painting. This accretion of paint and gesture holds energy, every stroke carrying the memory and felt-sense of my experience. I believe that as I bring body/mind to the painting's creation, as I invest my hand with responsivenss to what has moved me in witness to the land which I wish to share with you, the painting achieves aliveness and resonance that can be transferred to and felt by the viewer. This intentionality embues the paintings with the desired atmosphere of place and and charges the surface of each painting with a matrix of energies drawn from deep observation and attentiveness. Feeling deeply, and drawing from memory, these paintings are layered palimpsests, imaginative responses to living in the beauty surrounding us.

I hope these paintings may be an instrument to draw us into the present moment with full attention, perhaps even to find a moment of peace.

I hope for these paintings to open a contemplative space in which you, esteemed viewer, may find your own meaning.

I have been thinking of Monet, poet of light and space. Monet inspires me. Why? Because i find in his work a congruence of feeling for the natural world as sustenance. I too need to immerse myself in its leafy greening, its decay, its blossoming. I need to be close to what is eternal to make sense of my own place in this fractured world. I find in Monet’s paintings, as perhaps do some of you, a reparative sense of meditation on loss and mortality. These are themes that preoccupy me in all my floral work.

As we are bombarded with images and stories of the war in Ukraine I have been walking to the public ponds and willows found within our own city. Though the garden of Monet was a walled and cultivated sanctuary, I too find solace in my urban walk. Looking into these reflective watery mirrors evidencing the eternal movement of clouds crossing the sky, the cyclical blooming and withering, and seeing the flowering of lights flickering above dark pools I am reminded of and consoled by what never ends.

In this new series “Nymphaea”, I continue to work toward paintings that come into being with you, the observer as an active participant in the coalescing of the image. I build the surface with fractured marks, with an accretion of paint and gesture that come into focus only from a distance. It is my intention to create the circumstances of witness. Deliberately choosing the well known motif of waterlilies I am consciously invoking Monet and the time in which he too was painting against a backdrop of war. Monet returned again and again to the paintings of waterlilies, a series that continued until his death. Painted even as the guns of the Great War drowned out cries for its end, his last monumental series of Waterlilies prevails as an enduring symbol of peace, gifted to the people of France on the day of the Armistice.

Like the echo in the above quoted Haiku, i hope these paintings may be an instrument to draw us into the present moment with full attention, perhaps even to find a moment of peace.

"Haiku are the shortest of poems, with the longest echoes." (Sylvia Forges-Ryan) A good haiku, like a well conceived painting distills a great deal of experience into a few phrases, and sets off a chain of thoughts that expand like the ripples in a pond. I hope for these paintings to open a contemplative space in which you, esteemed viewer, may find your own meaning.

Poets inspire me. When painting, I steal their tools. I use alliteration, rhythm, revision and repetition, emptiness and form. With strokes of the brush and gestures of the hand I scribble and scratch, use tone, light and line, fullness and space, impasto and thin washes or glazes to create atmosphere and depth, using the journey of the built surface to arrive at meaning in my paintings.

In this poem by Paul Verlaine, I love how he is speaking of an internal struggle while using the image of a stroll by the lily pond, I love how repetition becomes incantation.

Maybe we could all use a little spell to dispel the the hovering black weather in our inner and outer worlds.

Sentimental Stroll

Paul Verlaine

The setting sun cast its final rays
And the breeze rocked the pale water lilies;
Among the reeds, the huge water
Lilies shone sadly on the calm water.
Me, I wandered alone, walking my wound
Through the willow grove, the length of the pond
Where the vague mist conjured up some vast
Despairing milky ghost
With the voice of teals crying
As they called to each other, beating their wings
Through the willow grove where alone I wandered
Walking my wound; and the thick shroud
Of shadows came to drown the final rays
Of the setting sun in their pale waves
And, among the reeds, the water-
Lilies, the huge water lilies on the calm water.

From Poems Under Saturn (Princeton University Press, 2011). All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the translator.

The poet ee cummings, who some would say cannot be bettered when writing about Spring, spent three months in a French prison during the first world war. He did not lose his love for the world, he went on to write; “We can never be born enough”.

In our own time as the wheel returns us to the birth of Spring and the wild plum blooms, so too the wounds of war have been reopened and suffering is felt anew on the earth.

What can one do? We who are privileged to live in the peace of the West are experiencing the beauty of the earth’s renewal while simultaneously witness to terror unfolding in the Ukraine spring, where bombs beside flowers bloom. I can feel helpless, as I imagine many of you do.

My practice is to stay steady and paint. To attend to the covenant I have with my own life, to make of my time here on earth of service to what is on the side of life, to what is of deep time, to make with my own hands and being that which is born of love.

Take time with your loved ones. Be in the home of your self. Be in your intentional life. Keep reaching, not for things, but for what brings you most alive for it is here that one is born again and again. Remember; “in Spring, anything may happen”.

I am happy to invite you to attend the 25th annual Eastside Cultural Crawl. This well loved event is going ahead after a Covid break last year for the first time in its 25 year history. November 12-14 is by appointment only with your Vaccine passport and mask. November 18-21, 2021 each building is open without the neccesity to book, but monitored by vaccine passport, masks and all Covid precautions in place.

I will have a range of works available, from a set of greeting cards to small drawings of oil on paper to larger works on canvas. I will also be showing a new series of collage with oil on panel.

I look forward to seeing you in person and sharing these works in my large, well ventilated studio in person, or virtually.

Visit my virtual studio tour here

Firstly I would like to offer my gratitude to all of you who have subscribed to my newsletter and to thank the many of you that continue to be supportive, who inspire me and to those who have been collectors of my work.

I am enjoying the turn toward the season of sweaters, the pleasure of pulling on an extra layer in the morning when the air is chill and clouds cover the mountains. The days are beginning to emerge from a shroud of fog, mysterious beginnings that move toward brightness and lighten as the day progresses.

I am reminded of how my own paintings emerge slowly from unknown origins. I have to search for them, obscured as they are by my own lack of clarity, my initial inclination toward blindness. I discover each work through close observation, curiosity, felt-sense experiment and play. Intuition guides me to remove all that is unnecessary. I could say this is not separate from how one encounters the best possible version of one’s life!

The longer I have borne witness to the seasons, and the longer I have observed my working processes the more I trust and understand the necessity of this committed and playful fumbling toward the light.

Painting is, in its own mysterious way, the path I make each day to find my balance in this unbalanced world of brutalities and beauty.

I would like to share with you something a valued client recently said to me:

“I “collect” your pieces because they make me feel calm but also interested in the future.”

I share this because I am encouraged by how a work of art has the presence and potential to touch and inspire another traveller on the path. We are all living in difficult and unsettled times. We need reasons to believe in a more inclusive and harmonious future.

What is your path? Whatever it is, the path you choose to walk is of utmost importance. Believe in yourself, your journey is of inspiration to others.

I am excited to stand each day in front of the empty canvas. I believe the creative intention to make paintings imbued with a sense of harmony and balance, autonomy and love is a life-affirming act.

Please enjoy here a short video clip in which you can hear me speak about the painting I am proud to be donating in support of the youth arts organization Arts Umbrella. My painting is 36 x72", oil on canvas called "Distallate of the Sun". You can bid on it in the live auction.

I am excited to share news of my upcoming solo show at the Vancouver Gallery Visual Space. Yes, you can visit! Although there will not be the customary "Vernissage" or opening night of old, you can visit the gallery in person with all Covid safety practices observed. If you prefer to book an appointment for a private viewing, please contact the gallery here. If you wish to meet me at the gallery, I will be available at select times, please book here.

Months ago, when given this opportunity to exhibit new work, I had no idea the opening date would fall on Earth Day, April 22nd. Auspicious indeed.
My inspiration for this body of work is rooted in my love of the natural world, in particular her forms of flora and the earthen, cyclical energies that inform "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower". In the months of preparation for this show, my studio practice was informed by memories of last year's spring, the first Spring of the Pandemic, where we were all rooted in place, uncertain of our individual and collective futures. I spent as much time as I could outside, hands in the earth, all senses awoken to the return of life, participating in its re-seeding. This opportunity to be in the presence of earth's beauty and her generous proliferation, was to feel more deeply my own sense of mortality and the simultaneous awareness of my ability to rebirth and regenerate my own life and practice of painting. In the gift of a gestalt shift and the spaciousness of arrested time, new perceptions of the recurrent themes of my work became available to me. These paintings are more open, filled with gesture and their vanishings.They are odes to possibility and the unknown....from which springs all new life.

I invite you to watch this short video. Recorded in my studio, by the artist Tiffany Blaise, it is a small preview in which I give a little more insight into the work you can soon see in person at Visual Space Gallery.

I will be releasing another short film during the course of the exhibition. Subscribers to my emails will have first access, so if you would like to share this opportunity with others, please share this email and ask them to subscribe.

Thanking all of you for being here, your support and encouragement is invaluable to me.

Warmly, Gabryel

I invite you to visit Visual Space Gallery April 22-May 15

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday-Saturday noon- 5PM
3352 Dunbar St
Vancouver
604-559-0576
info@visualspace.ca

“Art is a force for resistance and repair” Olivia Laing

In this time of crisis, making art is not only refuge, but as Olivia Laing points out in her essay “How to survive self-isolation, the role of art in difficult times” a necessary form of resistance.

“Art is about paying attention to reality” Olivia Laing.

In our studios and in our homes as we have struggled and survived this past year of the pandemic, we have adapted, we have grown our patience and tolerance for each other, we have learnt that the path of least resistance, as water parts for the stone in its path, is the way of least suffering. Resistance is not always pushing against. Resistance can be stopping, looking deeply, resistance can be time stilled, the time you take to make a painting or quietly to contemplate the garden you have been tending. Resistance can be the choice to turn away from the frenetic churning of the news cycle and sit in stillness with a loved sculpture.

Art made or art appreciated can be an antidote to despair. Sitting in the solitude of your own home, loneliness can be assauged by the touch of another heart brought to life in a well crafted work of fiction. To read or to listen to another’s story is to know one is not alone. Art is not about distraction or avoidance but attention to reality.

Olivia Laing refers often in her writing to the artist Derek Jarman, who died in another time of crisis, in the era of HIV and the plague of Aids. At the end of his life, Jarman chose to grow a garden in one of the most inhospitable of climates and barren soil, stones really, of Dungeness, Kent. “Modern Nature” is his meditative diary.

This energetic impulse, to act creatively and regeneratively despite the acutely felt and painful reality of his own dying, teaches me to never give in to the passivity that can corrode a life. In the climate of today’s uncertainties I am inspired to respond with my own expressions of hope, gestures of aliveness and offerings of love simply for the gift of being alive.

The true plague is fear and its attendent anxieties. Fear is what imperils our connection to others and to life itself.

Creativity empowers and gives me choice, it always connects and endlessly rebirths. There is no confinement in the mind, no isolation. Freedom is alive and without horizon in each one of our imaginative minds.

I enter 2021 with a sense of renewal. I am grateful to all who have supported my practice throughout this year of profound change. Thank you.

I am made more resilient by great loss and feel inspired by new beginnings. With such upheaval, what cannot be questioned? What can you reimagine in your own life? What is left undone? What seed have you yet to plant?

I encourage all of you to feel the possibility of your own life, the richness and fertile potentials waiting for your discovery.

at the threshold,
warmly,Gabryel

We exist in a stream of change. We can resist or surrender to the flow, but like a river, life itself never stops flowing.

I, perhaps like many of you, am stepping into new waters as Covid sweeps the planet and regimes teeter on the brink. I have left the edge of the Fraser River, home to my studio practice for the last 20 years, for the unknown of a new studio. I have chosen to immerse myself in different waters, to be a participant in an artistic community. Leaving the solitude and quiet of a tidal estuary for the noise of shunting rail cars and the ever present hum of human industry, I am choosing growth. Seldom comfortable, change always brings us to a new edge. It is at that edge, that tip of shocking aliveness visible in the new shoot, that growth is happening.

My window of comfort has been to look from my open studio door to the garden, to hear the gentle clack of black bamboo in the wind, to know the hawk is passing because all the small birds are suddenly chirping their alarm. Now I am learning to love the thunder of the freight train rattling my window, to know the rhythms of boxcars flowing in, flowing out, a tide without water still bearing goods.

1000 Parker St. has long been home to a thriving community of artists. I am one of the fortunate to find a studio home within its rambling halls. Although the building is not open for its usual celebration of art, artists and artisans in the annual Eastside Culture Crawl, you may chat with me virtually (using the chat icon on this page) Sunday afternoon November 22 between 1-3. In-person private viewing is available... book a studio visit with me. I look forward to the opportunity of showing you my work in the new space, third floor, studio 362. It is a place full of light, height and ample fresh air. Spacious, with room to breathe safely.

I am excited to have a new opportunity to show my work in Vancouver. Along with the beautifully curated Boutique shop Gild and Co. and Vancouver Art Gallery Rentals and Sales. I am pleased to be included in the showrooms of Once A Tree Furniture.

I want to say thank you, with deep gratitude to all of you, old friends and new, who offer support in so many ways, who sustain and make buoyant my continuance in this life of creative practice. I could not do it without you.

In this time of uncertainty I am reminded by the golden crowns of the trees I see from these new windows, that this season, the one of radiant color, is also the season that leaves wither and die. They let go. Their fallen scattering of gold makes fertile the ground in which trunk and limb reach and grow.

I am excited by what I do not yet know, for on this journey between birth and death, to encounter the unknown is to encounter the self where one has not yet been brought fully alive. If we can look with courage into our own unknown self we can learn to trust the stream.

May the current of your life bear you closer to your heart's intention
may you be uplifted

Gabryel

for a moving read and listen: the poem “At The River Clarion"by Mary Oliver link here: https://wordsfortheyear.com/2018/04/14/at-the-river-clarion-by-mary-oliver/

The wind is warm, peonies are emerging. In the vegetable garden I planted just over a month ago I am already astonished and gratified to be harvesting. This time of isolation has been one of many and varied creativities. While many struggle and I feel for the loss in all communities, I am also deeply affected by how creatives everywhere, in all walks of life, are bringing courage and ingenuity into a profoundly changed world and are working alone or together to reimagine our future. In this fragile and vulnerable moment in humanity's history I feel all acts of creativity are important and vital.

I am therefore very excited to say that I am joining a talented group of artists to exhibit some new works at Visual Space Gallery for a Summer Exhibition. The gallery will be open for in person viewing, spatially distanced, all cleaning protocols in place. Although there is no Vernisage or customary opening night. I invite you to contact Yukiko Onley to book an appointment if you wish a specific time to view. If you wish to meet me there, please send me an email, or call 604-612-1998, otherwise gallery hours are 12-5 Tuesday thru Saturday.

Also new, and available to acquire at the exquisitely curated shop of owner Bonnie Wilson's Gild and Co, are original, one of a kind, signed oil paintings on archival paper. Drop by to view. Bonnie or staff member will be happy to show you this new offering as well as to show you a select collection of my paintings.

I am very happy to be part of the Dunbar community led by creative women.These entreprenuerial business owners continue to bring beauty to our lives while supporting local artists and cultural expression despite this challenging and changing moment in our history.

Art matters in times of uncertainty and hardship. Beauty persists, and people still look to flowers for food of a different kind than the one on the supermarket shelves. Flowers emerge from cracks in pavement, from many difficult soils, simply and quietly, they rise and bloom.

"Far from distracting us from what is essential, beauty can draw us closer to all that is good and holy and healing". JODY HASSETT SANCHEZ, MAY 1, 2020,

Check out this for more interesting reading on why art matters in a pandemic http://https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/art-during-the-time-of-coronavirus/

Wishing you health and creative days,
Gabryel

How are you coping?

In solitude I have discovered, one meets not only the self but one’s love of engagement with others. The more deeply I enter the heart of solitude, it is here that I find awaits each precious relationship connecting me to all hearts.

Liberation from routines can often create opportunity, so in this gap It has been my pleasure to work with the professional help and exceptional team of @DazedandConfucius, to launch a new website! I am pleased to be able to invite you to view my work here… Gabryel.com

All of us are responding differently to the disruptive challenges we face, perhaps you are beginning to feel restless about returning to a world remembered, but no longer as it was. And yet, in the pause, I feel with others who wish to prolong these restorative, slower days of care and kindness, the compassionate space for our own and earth’s healing.

I hope you and your loved ones are together finding ways not just to survive but even to thrive. It is my wish for you to find pockets of peace in the chaos, and to emerge from our global crisis with renewed creative resolve in whatever is your vision for work, discipline or relationships.

When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future.” Charles Eisenstein from his essay; The Coronation.

I wanted to share a little about how Covid 19 has shifted my practice as I manage sheltering in place, which unlike many less fortunate, includes both a studio and garden. Although as a working artist I thrive on long hours of solitude, and have optimistically built a career on uncertainties, in the first weeks I found my attention scattered, my ability to focus fragmented.

My response was to tend the earth. I recognize that our human presence has disturbed nature’s balance and felt compelled to pay attention in one small way, putting my hands into the soil, beginning a vegetable garden. In these Spring days of sun and showers, witnessing the miracle of growth from seed to emergent plant has been grounding and regenerative.

This season, one of suspension, solitude and stillness as well as the ever-renewing forward tilt and vigour of unstoppable Spring has inspired new works on paper. Blossom and text interwoven. Working on paper with oils, graphite and pastels free up the release of quick gestures. Combined with lines of poetry this way of working enables me to respond with fluidity and immediacy that a larger painting may inhibit.

I am aware that in the studio I am recording and alive to the time I am living in, I want my work to reflect the instability of this time but also its vitality, its fierceness in the face of threat. These works have open spaces existing simultaneously with clusters of marks both heavy and light, giving rise to the push and pull, the tensions I and I imagine others, perhaps you, are feeling in this vitally charged and fragile present moment.

Quoting New York gallerist Magda Sawon in her recent op-ed on coming through Covid, no matter how convincing our digital lives may become, “art will always need to be seen in real spaces, to deliver a full spectrum of contemplative experience.”

I look forward to our next opportunity to meet and share art,
To book a studio visit, with the observation of safe protocols, please call 604-612-1998

May you be well,

Gabryel

I am excited to be extending to you this invitation to view my new work. Please enjoy a moment out of the rain to encounter my solo exhibition in the showroom of the Vancouver Art Gallery Rentals and Sales. The paintings will be on view until March 27th.

I will be giving a talk about the work and process on Tuesday evening, the 11th February at 7pm. Seating is limited, so if you wish a seat, please plan ahead.

Thank you for your continued support

warmly, Gabryel

Phone: 604 662 4746

Email: manager@artrentalandsales.com
Follow: @vanartrental
Location:750 Hornby Street
Annex Bldg, 1st floor
Vancouver, BC
V6Z 2H7
Showroom hours:
Mon–Fri: 10am–5pm
Tuesday evenings by appointment
Closed Statutory Holidays

Friends, I am inviting you to come and visit me in my new studio! #308 1000 Parker St. I have been on the move since late winter of 2018, experiencing a studio residency in Murawai, New Zealand this spring, and a studio sublet this summer at 1000 Parker St., and now find myself in the gratitude of settling into a new space in the historic Vancouver building and artist enclave 1000 Parker St.

I will be a participant for the first time in this year’s Eastside Cultural Crawl. I am excited to be making this move, joining a fantastic and well-established community of committed and skilled artists calling 1000 Parker their work home.

I will be showing new paintings and works in a new format; oil, oil stick, graphite, crayon and pastel on paper. Inhabiting new space opens new space in the creative body/mind and new containers old and sustain the creation of new shapes and forms.

The 23rd annual Eastside Cultural Crawl open hours are:

November 14-17th
• Thursday, November 14th- 5pm -10Pm
• Friday, November 15th- 5pm -10pm
• Saturday, November 16th- 11am -6pm
• Sunday, November 17th-11am -6pm

I look forward to the opportunity of connecting with you!

I am excited to say that I have been accepted for a month-long artist residency in New Zealand, this March 2019. As I near the mid-point of my 60th year, I feel a bit like our native salmon who instinctually navigate themselves to the stream of their birth years after swimming in a wide and faraway sea. My intention is to relax into the land of my beginnings, to feel the currents of air and water that first entered my being. Given a studio in which to experiment and explore, how might these influences inform my work?

I will be posting on my blog now and then. If you wish to share a glimpse into my adventure, I invite you to check my website, go to “blog” and follow along.

Earthskin Muriwai is a sanctuary of simplicity and silence,
amidst nature – where during creative exploration we can
move beyond the self to a deeper consciousness.

This is a place where the sacred blending of human and nature connect and has the opportunity to be re-cognized.

This place allows deep quiet and immersion, the land becomes the True Teacher.