The Last Word from artist Wendy Wacko on ‘Embracing Canada’
By: Lisa Chester
As her exhibition, Embracing Canada, at Agora Gallery was closing, artist Wendy Wacko took the opportunity to briefly reflect on Canada’s unity through her paintings and to spend a little time with her friend and mentor, Doris McCarthy, by screening the 1983 film Doris McCarthy: Heart of a Painter.
Wacko studied under McCarthy, and they became close friends over the decades they knew each other. They would take painting trips together in April each year to remote areas of Canada, sometimes travelling in by helicopter, to capture the rugged beauty in a style that gently moves with light and shadow.
The paintings on exhibit at Agora were landscapes from all over Canada from Haida Guaii in British Columbia to the rocky shores of Newfoundland. After her house in Jasper burnt down during the wildfires two years ago, Wacko has been living and painting on Georgian Bay where she completed this body of work.
“The work is from across Canada. The way Wendy works is she will go to these remote locations and Doris McCarthy works largely the same way; they would go to the locations and do lots of sketches and then come back to the studio and then make them into finished paintings,” said Cindy Hubert of Agora Gallery.
The film came about after there was interest in doing a coffee table book of McCarthy’s work, but she felt she had more to say than a book could possibly contain. Since Wacko was also an established filmmaker, McCarthy declared her story must be made into a film.
The documentary is a beautiful art piece that captures the honesty a friendship can reveal and nicely stands the test of time. It follows McCarthy as she travels to sketch, her journeys to achieve her visions and style. The film ends with the artist planning and painting a landscape.
“One of the things I think is really important is every landscape should tell a story, and what’s your story is at the foreground, the middle ground, or the background,” said Wacko.
She has been, after decades of painting landscapes, returning to her art school roots by studying portraiture, an entirely new challenge for her to experiment with. She also talked about dabbling with collage to companion with a painting of the same palette. With the exhibition over, Wacko will return to Jasper where she and her husband finally have just received their building permit to rebuild their house.
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