Our Mother Earth, newest solo exhibition by White Rock figurative artist Katherine Garratt, will be bringing bold colour, mythology and its own kind of magic to the contemporary art-friendly walls of Nomad Gallery (1377 Johnston Rd.), opening on June 8.
It’s a follow-up to Garratt’s 2024 show, The Golden Age, also at Nomad, and a companion piece to her current show for Vancouver’s HelloArt (running until July 8 at Park Place, 666 Burrard St.).
As in every Garratt exhibit, the work is instantly identifiable from the artist’s clean, strong, hard-outlined approach; her vibrant hues; and intriguing central figures inspired by both ancient sculpture and 20th-century expressionism.
The paintings, for all their apparent simplification of form, are anything but simple in either theme or execution.
As Garratt explains, each finished canvas is the result of hours of extensive, careful reworking to refine her shapes, compositions and colours, and her imagery is rooted in her own extensive study of mythology and art history (the Toronto-born artist holds an Honours BFA in Visual Art from York University).
In Our Mother Earth, for example, she is drawing on influences that include sculptural pieces that date back to the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras in Europe.
“In our ancient mythology the earth is perceived as female – as a goddess,” she told Peace Arch News.
“The feeling was she is a living, breathing entity that needs to be respected and honoured.”
As with The Golden Age, as well as an ecological sensibility, there is also a socio-political awareness underlying the imagery – in that show, Garratt was inspired by the pioneering work of Lithuanian archeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas (Civilization of the Goddess), positing Neolithic and Bronze Age societies in which people lived in peaceful co-existence.
“Instead of weapons, they carried musical instruments – and that’s a big influence for my work,” Garratt notes.
Her broad colour spectrum offers a dynamic sense of inclusion, as does her imagery of ever-changing and evolving human/animal/plant hybrids, which suggests that everything in nature has a place and value and can exist in harmony.
“We should be accepting of all creation…that’s my idea of paradise,” she said.
Another feature of Our Mother Earth series is that each title forms part of a longer narrative of the goddess as she interacts with humans, animals and plant life.
Most of the titles are about inviting, welcoming or listening – The Heron Speaks and They Listen is one example – and it's not hard to see in Garratt's work an invitation to humans to enter a new era of understanding, following our own present era, which seems so much about destruction, confrontation and division.
The goddess figure and the hybrid humans in her paintings are considerate of the animals around them, she points out – "they know they have a language and they should learn how to speak it."
Interestingly, although they listen, Garratt never puts ears on her figures.
"I suppose I think of them as having a sixth sense – some form of telepathy," she said.
Our Mother Earth draws on examples of goddess imagery ancient art cited in The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford – the Goddess of Laussel in France and the Shrine of Catal Huyak in Anatolia (modern Turkey) among them.
But another influence on her creative process is the 1964 work Man and his Symbols, conceived and edited by famed Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, which looks at the links between dreams and archetypes and how perception of shapes (as in Hermann Rorschach’s ink blots) can play a role in awareness of the unconscious.
Garratt's classical art training at Thornton Hall involved reproducing works by such masters as Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.
And although that gave a strong technical foundation, she knew that she ultimately needed to travel another path – following the example of another strong inspiration, Pablo Picasso, who went through a similar process before developing his own individual approaches.
One of Garratt's mentors at York University, well-known Toronto sculptor Hugh LeRoy, challenged his students to observe a model and then make a drawing with their eyes closed, using the left hand instead of the right (or vice versa), and she understood it as an exercise in getting away from literal reproduction.
"He taught us how to draw our dreams," she said.
It's not surprising, then, that the starting point for her paintings, as Garratt noted, are shapes and colours she creates intuitively.
“A lot of people think it’s a simple process for me, but it’s not,” she said.
“It starts with colours and areas, just a feeling of shapes. Then, when I look at them, the outlines come in. And that’s when I start work on specific areas of the painting.
“I look at how the colours of each piece harmonize, work and work at it until I get the colours right. And then, finally, it's finished.”
For the current show, paintings are in a variety of size formats, ranging from 12" by 12" all the way up to 36" by 36" – and images are also available as giclee prints and signed cards.
Our Mother Earth continues at Nomad Gallery until June 21.
