3 Concordians on painting contest shortlist

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.

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.

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.”