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BOLDER, BROADER, MORE URGENT...
Pat Service's recent landscape paintings may startle some of her admirers.
Her new works are among her strongest and most personal to date, but
anyone expecting current versions of the pictures with which Service
has established her reputation - freely handled images of places instantly
recognizable to anyone familiar with Vancouver and its surroundings
as typical of that part of the world - will be surprised. Over the past
decade and a half it has seemed self-evident that even though she was
never interested in treating her motifs realistically - any more than
she was attracted to conventionally picturesque or "paintable" B.C.
subjects - Service has been profoundly engaged by the character of the
region where she was born and raised, and where she continues to live.
Everything from her home turf's apparently untouched nature to its comfortable
civility provided her with points of departure for energetic canvases.
Some of her most ambitious pictures have been about the light-filled
planes of the meeting of sky and sea, about the casual geometry of driftwood-strewn
beaches, or about the colour harmonies (or disharmonies) of ornamental
foliage and flowers in Vancouver's lovingly tended gardens and urban
parks.
Service's most recent works, however, are clearly about another kind
of terrain, a different locale. Many of her new pictures depend on confrontations
not of vast, cloud-filled skies with the reflective, unstable surface
of the sea, but with an endless stretch of dry land cultivated plains
dotted with sloughs and thickets of brush. We're on the Prairies, not
on the Coast. It's not a wholly unfamiliar landscape to Service. A veteran
of several of the celebrated Emma Lake Workshops, held in Northern Saskatchewan,
she has painted on the plains before and come to terms with their seemingly
featureless expanses and subtleties of light. It's clear from the vigour
of Service's Prairie pictures and the freshness of their structure that
she found changing locations, albeit temporarily, to have been provocative,
yet what is most notable about her recent works is not their nominal
subject-which is, after all, simply a trigger for the artist's ability
to create painterly equivalents for perceptions - but their authority
and resonance.
In her recent pictures, Service's touch seems broader, bolder, more
urgent than ever; skies, fields, and clusters of trees threaten to dissolve
into rapid scribbles of paint. Service's colour which has always tended
toward the expressive rather than the descriptive, seems even more unexpected
and autonomous. A sky can be mint green or yellow without implying ominous
weather, dawn, or sunset. Fields and trees can be mauve-grey, dull red,
heliotrope, or blazing yellow without suggesting that autumn foliage
is intended. In
some pictures, strokes of clear, brilliant hues float against relatively
naturalistic blues and greens, almost wrenching free of the demands
of observed reality to set up lively, independent colour rhythms.
None of this is new to Service's landscape painting. For years, she
has been preoccupied with both the closely observed and the willfully
invented, declaring, in her best work, her double allegiance to perceived
reality and private impulses. Her most convincing compositions have
firm abstract underpinnings, no matter how much they remind us of familiar
settings, while conversely, no matter how audacious her colour or how
uninhibited her paint handling, she remains responsive to the specifics
of place, of season, and of time of day. Service's recent Prairie landscapes
simply intensify these qualities. If her free-wheeling gestures forcefully
remind us of the artist's presence as maker and as witness, they also
evoke particular textures of the landscape and the instability of changing
weather and shifting light. If the buoyant chromatic counter-point of
floating strokes reminds us of the artifice of painting, it also anchors
Service's most outrageous colouristic inventions, making them seem perfectly
plausible as comments on the world around us, so that a lemon sky, far
from seeming improbable, becomes emblematic of some utterly convincing
but unidentifiable quality of light.
In a sense, this equivalence of the natural world and apparently unnatural
colours should not surprise us. The most improbable hues in Service's
palette can be found in nature; if justification were needed, their
intensity could be explained by the eye-grabbing brilliance of flowers
in the short Prairie summer. Nonetheless, Service feels she is now less
interested in local colour than she has been in the past. "I've been
reading more about colour and colour theory recently," she says. "And
I'm putting colour on differently. I'm layering it more. These paintings
take much longer to finish - six months to a year, sometimes." That
these carefully crafted canvases preserve an air of immediacy and spontaneity
has something to do with their genesis. "I looked hard and did some
drawings on the spot, with some colour in them," Service says, "and
I did some watercolours on the spot. Doing the watercolours was a way
of looking and remembering a place. Then I would be in the studio the
next day, so it was still very vivid to me."
Service acknowledges that some of the freedom of her recent works owes
something to her change of subject. "The landscape in Saskatchewan doesn't
have a lot of things in it," she says, "so it's easier to be abstract
and loose. Maybe that's why there are so many good Saskatchewan landscape
painters. I hadn't been in Saskatchewan in several years, so it was
fresh for me."
The real issue, of course, is not what provoked a particular series
of pictures, but the result. Whatever the source of Service's recent
works, their strength resides not only in the way the artist addresses
questions of fidelity to experience - of all kinds, not just visual
- but in how she addresses "purely" painterly issues. Whatever their
immediate motivation, whatever the basis for theft imagery, Service's
recent landscapes are some of her most inventive, assured, and adventurous.
In the end, that is what matters - not their connection, however strong
or tenuous, to a place.
KAREN WILKIN
New York
July1998
Karen Wilkin writes on art for The New Criterion and is the author
of books on Cezanne, Morandi and Stuart Davis.
© Karen Wilkin (used with permission)
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