Artists: Dave Colvin & Leon Pewarchuk
November 28 to December 17, 2024
Gallery Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 5pm. Evenings by appointment.
First Friday, extended hours, December 6, 11am to 9pm.
Meet the Artist times, TBA.
Developing from an unexpected reunion after 45 years without contact, an art teacher and his student have come together for a joint exhibition. This unique showcase, not only highlights their individual talents but also celebrates the enduring bond of friendship, shared creativity, and the power of reconnection.
With a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Manitoba, Leon Pewarchuk became a teacher of Art, Advertising Art and Graphic Design. In his 25 years of retirement, he returned to painting with oil on canvas for his own pleasure, inspired by his years at the cottage in Northwestern Ontario and his love of the outdoors.
Through his paintings, he expresses his creativity with vibrant, colourful landscapes drawn from his imagination and his real life visual experiences. The resulting work is both evocative and compelling.
Dave Colvin is an inveterate people-watcher.
His fascination with aspects of the human condition has been a constant throughout his life… as an artist, playwright, parent, husband, and clinician.
Although geared toward a future in visual communications and illustration art, his life took a decidedly different trajectory after high school, which ultimately led to a long and satisfying career in the behavioral health field. As such, he chooses to reflect human emotion through his artwork.
Fleshing out these emotional memories are key to the examination of Colvin’s art.
Given that yearning is said to be a blend of the primary emotions of love and sadness, this is no small task.
Dave draws inspiration from the Early Netherlandish painting schools, and creative sources as diverse as the outsider work of Henry Darger. The narrative compositions of Jessie Oonark, Pieter Bruegel, and the single-panel, darkly comedic cartoons of Gahan Wilson.
His quasi-realistic pieces are also driven by dreams, psychedelia, and too many hours poring over Graphis magazines in Commercial Art class.
Colvin’s commission works hang in private collections across North America and the UK. He has also been short-listed multiple times in the Manitoba Society of Artists open juried competitions.
Currently, atypical watercolour is his go-to, but any combination of water-soluble media including acrylic, acrylic pen, India ink, and gouache is fair game.
David Colvin’s ARTIST STATEMENT
Although my work is primarily representational and features hints of the surreal, at the centre of all that I try to accomplish artistically, is to evoke a measure of personal identification in the viewer.
My pieces are presented with buried narratives; unclear stories that will often be translated differently by each individual.
I try to accomplish this by introducing dichotomies and visual metaphors, such as holy men reveling while basilicas burn, curling rocks made from jam cans, errant tricycles lodged in tree canopies, and tumbling umbrellas that twist through wind-whipped skies above darkened neighborhoods.
Through this exhibit, it is my goal to evoke the emotional memories of those who see my work, and to challenge them to look more carefully at their own worlds.