latitude 43.456193 longitude -80.500507

Robert Achtemichuk

artist’s statement 2

liZ WYlie 6

garY michael dault 12

acknoWledgments 20

september, 2004, 7:15 pm2004

gouache on silk

12.5 x 20.2 cm

Front

august 25, 2010, 11 pm2010

gouache on paper

30 x 31 cm

Back

march, 2007, 11 pm2007

gouache on paper

21 x 20.5 cm

coVer images

32

Observation, then memory, guides the development of the images. Elements are made more important/dominant by using composition, colour and simplification. What is the magnitude or capacity of my memory? What remains? I am at times not cognizant that elements are left out. Over the years the images are becoming more complex as memory becomes additive and observations become keener. Accuracy, details and their importance vary as my focus on the view stimulates a holistically charged, colourful event through the dwellings, the trees and the weather systems that I render. Light spilling from windows, the divisions made when fences bisect open spaces, and the infinite, minute changes that occur because of natural light and weather, become reflections of my surroundings and their effect on me. I think of my work as portraiture in a civil/public, urban forum. It is about climate in a temporal sense and the receptivity of the presenter who then re-fabricates the experience.

March, 2011

robert achtemichuk

I am curious about visual phenomena happening from my own back yard. The views from my window and from the back door into the yard have become locations of contemplation and receptivity. I am mostly receptive to colour. It fascinates me. After years of working with these views, I have realized that there are four sides to this experience —east, south, and west but it has been mostly the area directly opposite—south that remains a dominant image source. Like Moriandi, I recycle the same elements, referencing the ever-changing possibilities in this limited subject matter. Initially, my interest was the full moon in the sky, the trees and the buildings. But my interest has grown to include the effects of the moon, the city lights and the atmosphere changes. What is the colour of those sodium vapour lights?

FebruarY 2, 2007 1 am2007

gouache on silk

24 x 21 cm

noVember 13, 2005 10 pm2005

gouache on paper

19 x 28 cm

76

After a long career as a printmaker, Robert Achtemichuk began making paintings of the view of his back yard in Kitchener, Ontario, about fifteen years ago, in the mid 1990s. In the year 2000 he decided to concentrate on gouache on silk for his medium and support. The subjects expanded to remembered scenes, viewed while on a walk or in the car. The small paintings in this show are all from the last ten years, fruits of this project. The word “project,” however, sounds too deliberate and perhaps grand a term for a venture that has been basically modest in scope, though superlative in its results. His tiny paintings, many of them night subjects, and featuring the moon, are exquisite meditations on the seemingly mundane aspects of our daily lives. In fact, even this superficial description is misleading, for the subject of the works is not actually the view at hand, which is simply the objects randomly seen out of a window, but is rather the elements involved (in all levels and in their delicate balance) in the making of a painting. What is the making of a painting, after all? We may as well ask, as did Virginia Woolf’s character, what is the meaning of life? Ultimately, as we discover through the act(s) of living, so many things in life are not in fact knowable or understood. How does Achtemichuk manage to convey such ruminations in his tiny, somewhat terse visual notations of the banal houses and trees in his suburban neighbourhood? This too is a mystery, but one that is most enjoyable to wonder about as we look at his paintings.

Another great pleasure in looking at Achtemichuk’s gouaches is the mental travel back and forth for the viewer between object or form depicted and the means he has used to achieve representation. So, tree trunks and branches, or banks of snow we read and recognize, then flip to the realm where we are looking at brush strokes and washes of paint, then back to the represented world again—mimesis, and the sheer wonder of it. In Achtemichuk’s work, all this happens slowly and easily, and with perfect balance, as though in a dream.

The similarity to Japanese Haiku poetry might come to mind, as Achtemichuk’s works are encapsulations, each stroke or sweep of the brush an indicator, a carrier of meaning to be unpacked and feasted on. A little bit of moonlight on a parked van, the streetlights reflected in windows of an office building, the bare winter branches of some trees—none of these are particularly meaningful in and of themselves, on the surface, anyway. It is his distilling and condensing of visual form and vocabulary that gives the works their kick. The artist’s delight in including the moon (usually a full moon, but in one work it is a thin crescent) is held in check, these are not mawkish greeting-card renderings. His emotions are completely in control, and there is almost a sense of vacancy where that poisonous beast, expressive touch and gesture, might threaten to overload and derail his images. The moon—a subject for poetry for thousands of years, termed “a naked egg” by Wallace Stevens, and “a joyless eye” by Percy Bysshe Shelley—is a tricky thing to paint. How to make it stick up in the sky area of the picture, not visually dislodge and get viscous or pasty? How to give a sense of its illuminating quality, yet not have it too stark on the painting’s support, splitting off from the rest of the composition? These are some of the challenges that face a moon painter. But Achtemichuk handles the moon with ease—along with the rest of the objects depicted—as though these works came from him effortlessly.

Achtemichuk was born, grew up, and went to art school in Winnipeg, that self-contained world of a prairie city that was home to that singular artist of the last century, Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald. FitzGerald, the odd man out in the so-called Group of Seven (he was its tenth and last member) succeeded wonder-fully in seeing the world in a grain of sand, and it is this same quality of dispassionate observation that helps to make Achtemichuk’s works so successful. We might also call to mind the wet-in-wet water-colours of David Milne, a Canadian artist of the same time period, who, until his fantasy works of the 1940s, also used the landscape and urban forms around him as springboards for his formal explorations,

Dispassionate Clarity: recent gouache paintings by Robert Achtemichuk

What is the meaning of life? That was all— a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark …

– Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

and also held his existential emotions in check when compressing aesthetic emotion into his work. Of course there is a contemporary context for Achtemichuk’s work as well. In Canada we might think of the efforts to personally extend the tradition of landscape painting in the hands of artists such as David Alexander, Monica Tap, Carol Wainio, or John Hartman. And internationally, this trajectory is dominated by Peter Doig, who spent much of his childhood and adolescence in Canada and creates moody Munch-like works featuring canoes and misty lakes.

Robert Achtemichuk’s works are small in scale and narrow in their purview in comparison. But a viewer should not be fooled by Achtemichuk’s casual and modest means, and at times the almost naïve quality to his pieces; as an artist who has traveled a long road, he knows exactly what he is doing, and to excellent and transporting effect.

Liz Wylie is curator at the Kelowna Art Gallery in Kelowna, BC. Previously she was curator at the University of Toronto Art Centre from 1996 to 2007. She has published widely, mostly on historical and contemporary Canadian art.

liZ WYlie

maY, 2009, 7 am2009

ouache on silk

22.5 x 19 cm

december 7, 2007, 8:30 pm2007

gouache on washi

16 x 13 cm

maY 27, 2010, 2:15 am2005

gouache on silk

18 x 18 cm

FebruarY 19, 2010, 8 pm2010

gouache on washi

18 x 18 cm

12

Robert Achtemichuk and the Neighbourhood Pastoral

There’s a lot of moonlight in Robert Achtemichuk’s paintings. Moons and moonlight, stars and indigo skies. Then, closer, there is almost always a scrim of trees growing up between the infinite night sky and the foreground. Sometimes there is the homely interference of houses, backyards, back fences and parked cars.

If it weren’t for the infinite reach of his night skies, you might think of Achtemichuk as a regionalist. But while his stance is local, his vision is long, arcing from the immediate to the mythopoeic. Maybe that’s what all gifted regionalists do: perceive the infinite in the grain of sand that is everydayness.

Like all genuine poets, Achtemichuk’s muse—and aesthetic mistress, painterly handmaiden—is surely the White Goddess. The White Goddess, incarnated most tellingly by Robert Graves in his delicious if perplexing book from 1948 (subtitled A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth) proceeds on the assumption that it is this eternal lunar deity, her power generated by the changing phases of the moon, who inspires in writers the language of true poetry.

She seems still to be diligently at work, in these anti-poetic days—a bit tattered and weary, perhaps, and forced to compete with neon lights and the all-pervasive glow of giant, flat-screen TVs everywhere. And yet she shines bravely on.

She shines her nacreous, pearlescent light down onto Robert Achtemichuk’s paintings, for example, transforming his neighbourhoods of houses, fences and parked cars into a muted world made soft and gentle under the goddess’s benediction.

One of the pleasures of Achtemichuk’s pictures lies in the way they posit the existence of a strange, usually overlooked abyss that opens between the long reach of the artist’s moonlit skies and yearning trees

gary michael dault

and the (literally) sublunary nature of the social world (cars, houses) we mostly inhabit (how infrequently we lift our eyes to the heavens!). This polarization of far and near, of the distance—which is not physical but rather metaphysical—between the foreground where we live and the background where we dream, lends Achtemichuk’s paintings an internal dislocation, a slippage, between the here-and-now present and the where-and-how distance that is the source of a great deal of their energy.

For while his paintings are ostensibly quiet—and in most of them you feel as if you could hear a pin drop (or a pine needle) in the spongy depths of his aesthetic silences, there is a great deal of what might be called torque in them—the wrenching and grinding of back-and-forth, of distance-and-proximity.

I referred to the paintings as inhabiting a genre which might be thought of as the “neighbourhood pastoral.” The action (albeit cosmic) that I have located within them would seem at first to preclude the possibility of the evenness, the steadiness required for the enactment of the pastoral idea.

For me, however, the contemplative grandeur and lyric endlessness of the infinite of sky and moon is only discernible as such when viewed over and above the secure resting place (and observation post) of that which we know well. The human neighbourhood is the locus of rumination, speculation and wonder. If we are going to gaze upon and accommodate what poet Anne Waldman once called “Giant Night,” with its hallucinations of moon and stars, we have to find someplace to stand.

And is this place to stand that Achtemichuk so delicately provides for us in these winning paintings —which are, as we are ourselves, the intoxicating coming together of the peace of acceptance and the sweet agitation of yearning.

Napanee, Ontario, April 25, 2011

september 12, 2010, 10:30 pm2010

gouache on paper

38.5 x 37.5 cm

FebruarY 16, 2011, 5:45 pm2011

gouache on paper

37.5 x 38 cm

JanuarY 3, 2011, 4 pm2011

gouache on paper

16.5 x 24.5 cm

april 7, 2011, 10 pm2011

gouache on silk

28 x 35 cm

march 19, 2011 11 pm2011

gouache on paper

13.5 x 20.5 cm

april 17, 2011, 11 pm2011

gouache on silk

17.5 x 39.5 cm

20

acknoWledgments

Robert Achtemichuk graduated from the University of Manitoba and continued his studies both self-directed and through an apprenticeship in France, at the University of Toronto, Sheridan Campus, and completed all courses towards a MFA from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City. He has exhibited his work at galleries across Canada and has led workshops at esteemed institutions including the Banff School of the Fine Arts and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. His teaching experience in drawing and printmaking include the School of Art at the University of Manitoba, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art and Art History program at University of Toronto Erindale and Sheridan College, and Open Studio. He has extensive museum and gallery experience and his advocacy roles include various committees and associations at the local, provincial and national level. He has been the Executive Director at Open Studio, Waterloo Regional Art Council, and the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery.

Robert Achtemichuk acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund. Robert thanks the galleries exhibiting this project, his friends, and his family for their support.

September 3–November 6, 2011Homer Watson House & Gallery1754 Old Mill Road Kitchener, Ontariowww.homerwatson.on.ca

January 7–March 4, 2012Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant20 Ava Road Brantford, Ontariowww.glenhyrst.ca

eXhibition dates

isbn 978-0-9877587-0-5Photography Robert Achtemichuk

Design Scott Lee

Printing Highland Printcraft