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3 Concordians on painting contest shortlist

The RBC Canadian Painting Competition honours up-and-coming artists
September 29, 2017
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By Matthew Scribner


Since 1999, the RBC Canadian Painting Competition has been a proving ground for young Canadian painters. With the support of the Canadian Art Foundation, the program picks 15 finalists every year to vie for significant prizes: $25,000 for the winner and $15,000 each for two honourable mentions. The consolation prize for finalists not in the top three is a respectable $2,500 each.

This year there are three Concordia alumni among the finalists. They are David Kaarsemaker, BFA (photog.) 04, Laura Rokas-Bérubé, BFA (painting & drawing) 13, and Joani Tremblay, MFA (studio art) 16.

Portage-1 David Kaarsemaker projects images onto cardboard before painting them. | Photo courtesy: David Kaarsemaker
David Kaarsemaker His studies of photography at Concordia gave David Kaarsemaker an appreciation for the imprint of the index, a theme that carries over into his paintings. | Photo credit: Sarah Fuller

Bleak buildings

Kaarsemaker studied photography at Concordia, not painting, yet the university was still a significant influence on his art. “Concordia’s strong theory-based approach taught me to become less naïve about art in general,” he says. “It gave me that critical lens through which to look at what I’m doing.”

Following some more time in Montreal and then Newfoundland, Kaarsemaker rounded out his education with an MFA from the University of Ottawa in 2014. It was the National Capital Region that inspired Portage 1, the painting that earned him a place among the RBC finalists.

“I was looking at the architecture around where I was living in Hull [in Gatineau, Que.] across the river from Ottawa,” he says. “This painting is of the Place de Portage buildings, which are these huge government complexes built in the late-’70s and early-’80s. Their aesthetics and the ideology under which they were built is disconnected from the lived experience of these buildings.”

Kaarsemaker constantly refines his methods.

“In this body of work, of which Portage 1 is a part, I had been using cardboard boxes and putting objects inside them to create a cubic perspectival space that would allow me to look through the canvas into an illusionary space,” he says.

Kaarsemaker now lives in Toronto, where he paints and works part-time in a wood shop. “Painting sales — you can’t really count on them,” he says. “There are some years that are really good, there are others that aren’t so good.” He has also taught art and painted sets for theatre groups in the recent past.

Paint by Number 7 The clichéd rose underlines the story of Laura Rokas-Bérubé’s painting. | Photo credit: Amanda Walker

Painting someone else’s picture

Cardboard also features in Laura Rokas-Bérubé’s entry, Paint by Number 7. The cardboard hand is a motif that appears in several of Rokas-Bérubé’s works. She explains its look by citing the influence of David Elliott, one of her former professors in the Department of Studio Arts.

One day, Rokas-Bérubé needed a model for hands, so she built some out of cardboard that was lying around his studio. “David does realistic paintings of these little maquettes that he builds, which I found to be an ingenious method,” Rokas-Bérubé says.

Rokas-Bérubé earned an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016 and still lives in the thriving California city. Her current job as another painter’s assistant explains the paint-by-numbers image in her nominated painting.

Laura Rokas-Bérubé Laura Rokas-Bérubé lives and works in San Francisco, Calif. | Photo courtesy: Laura Rokas-Bérubé

“I exhibit my work and when I sell it I get money from that,” she says. “But I also have a day job where I work for another, more established artist. I’ve developed a strained relationship with painting where I feel disconnected from the process by making someone else’s work.”

And the sevens? “I use a lot of imagery of luck in my work,” Rokas-Bérubé explains. “I don’t know if I’m actually superstitious or if weird, superstitious things just happen to me often.”

It is probably not luck that got Rokas-Bérubé shortlisted for the RBC award, yet she is modest about the accomplishment, citing her persistence. “I’ve applied before,” she says.

A utopic landscape

The Lure The sky in Joani Tremblay’s painting is an allusion to Georges Braque’s Landscape Near Antwerp. | Photo credit: Jean-Michael Seminaro

Joani Tremblay, too, strikes a humble note. “I think they’re all very amazing artists,” she says of the other finalists.

Her place in the shortlist is due to her painting The Lure of the Local Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. “I’ve been working on the idea of utopia for the past couple of years,” Tremblay says. “So I’m interested in the idea of how landscape painting is always correlated with culture.”

A backpacking trip to Costa Rica, as well as recent travels to Texas, inspired Tremblay’s RBC entry. “I create landscapes from existing places and illusory places, tangling between abstraction and representation” she says. “This painting is a mash-up of Costa Rica and Texas, which to me becomes this very utopic landscape. It’s kind of a desert, but with luxurious plants.”

Joani Tremblay A backpacking trip to Costa Rica, as well as recent travels to Texas, inspired Joani Tremblay’s RBC entry.

Tremblay earned a bachelor’s degree at Université du Québec à Montréal 2012. She has had residencies in Berlin, Germany, and Tokyo, Japan, with exhibitions in Los Angeles, Calif., and Stockholm, Sweden, in the future.

She remembers her time pursuing her Concordia MFA fondly, especially studio visits from Department of Studio Arts professors François Morelli and Patrick Traer and of teaching undergraduates. “Teaching helps you verbalize what you’ve learned and helps you see creativity differently,” she says.

Tremblay lives in Montreal, where she co-directs the gallery Projet Pangée. She looks forward to travelling to Ottawa and meeting the other finalists. Kaarsemaker, Rokas-Bérubé and Tremblay all know some of the other artists on the shortlist, though they have never met each other.

Gathering with her fellow artists is an important component of being chosen for the shortlist, Tremblay says. “That’s going to be an interesting part, getting to know more of the Canadian art scene community.”

The winner and runners-up of the RBC Canadian Painting Competition will be announced on October 17, 2017, at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

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