HUMBOLDT — Around 600 landscape paintings will be on display at the Humboldt and District Gallery in June as part of Edie Marshall’s exhibit “Terrain.”
Terrain is a collection of 10” x 10” paintings of various landscapes painted by Marshall while touring the Great Plains, canyons and deserts of the United States and Western Canada in 2013.
Each painting for Terrain takes Marshall about 20 minutes to complete, many of which she did from the passenger seat of a car while using photos taken at the various sites on her iPhone.
Marshall said the exhibit is about societal obsession with virtual images. Her intention was to translate a virtual arrangement to the material physicality of painting.
“It’s not a controversial exhibit but it does say a few things. I think it talks about our obsessiveness with virtual images, how we take photos for granted these days,” Marshall said. “A thousand virtual little photos translated to paintings is a lot of material.”
Unlike with raw photos, Marshall said that by translating them into the medium of painting, there was a potential for colour shifts.
“Being a painter, I was thinking I wanted to see how they would feel magnified, and also that tactile experience of paint that was missing in photography,” she said.
“I think there is just aesthetically pleasing about the colours and so much paint, because there is so many different images. They are all landscapes, and I could see the audience really enjoying that aspect of them.”
Other exhibit works by Marshall include “Prairie Remains” and “Moving Landscapes.”
Prairie Remains is about the worn and damaged structures dotting the prairie landscape and about their stories, while "Moving Landscapes" started as a series of layered abstract landscape paintings with coloured grounds added, moving towards vibrant, saturated, hues.
Terrain will begin displaying in Humboldt on June 3.
The exhibit was previously shown at the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Regina.
