On Sunday, a week ago, Al and I took advantage of another sunny but cold day to drive over to the Seymour Art Gallery in Deep Cove, North Vancouver. I was curious to see what Pierre Coupey had done with the idea of painting on plates. Since spotting Renée Van Halm’s painted plates in her show at the West Vancouver Museum he has enthusiastically joined the artists who come to our house as ‘Raiders’. He has concentrated on painting black and white images incorporating a letter of the alphabet on large round plates.
For this show Pierre approached Vin Arora of Kingsmill Pottery studio on Granville Island and asked him to make the 26 ‘plates’ he needed for this show. He requested large round forms that are flat and have varying edges, and are still leather hard to allow for carving, sgraffito, stencilling and other manipulations of the surface. This photo shows Pierre and Vin in front of their work.
The gallery’s framed information piece gives details of Pierre’s career as a writer, poet, lecturer and artist so click on the photo and enlarge the text to read more.
I enjoyed seeing Pierre’s large paintings and meeting many of his guests (including fellow Raider Renée and her husband who’d taken advantage of sunshine to take a strenuous hike nearby). He tells me that he will give a full explanation of the meaning of the Neon text he had fabricated for the show on an upcoming Raid day. I’ll hold you to that, Pierre.
Before driving home to Port Moody we took a short, chilly walk around beautiful Cates Park. The late afternoon sun caught this fine tree just perfectly.
