Two ‘Raiders’ worked on plates in their own studios recently and neither drives a car. Wanting to fill my kiln and get everybody’s work finished I opted to take myself in to Vancouver and collect the plates. Of course I never want to just do one errand so this was a good day to check Renée Van Halm’s almost-over show at Equinox Gallery  and to see a recommended ceramic show in the Libby Leshgold Gallery at nearby ECU.

It was one of those rare sunny February days when you can imagine Spring isn’t far off, even though the temperature dropped below freezing overnight. At my first stop, Eric Metcalfe’s home in the Western Front, I carefully wrapped his newly underglaze-painted platter. It will be needed as a presentation piece for the Gala event there in early March. Eric introduced me to the Front’s new Executive Director, Australian Susan Gibbs. Philippe Raphanel had already left his plate there for me to pick up so then I drove the short distance down to ‘the Flats’.

Renée Van Halm’s show, Holding Pattern, is an astonishing blast of sunshine! An Equinox staff member told me that she smiles whenever she walks into the gallery, especially on a rainy Vancouver day.

This is taken from Renee’s information sheet: The works on canvas in this exhibition are based on the works of female artists from the 1920s, including painters such as Sonia Delaunay and Varvara Stepanova, textile artists Anni Albers and Marion Dorn, and Bauhaus artists and educators Otti Berer and Gunta Stölzl. Using experimantal motifs and colour relationships developed by these artists, Van Halm reintegrates these unconventional patterns with a two-dimensional painting language that envelops the viewer, bringing out obvious and subtle associations between colour ad forms. 

As well as using some of my platters and plates as canvases Renée has been working on three-dimensional forms made with clay slabs. Just one of these is included in this show. It uses earthenware, underglazes, acrylic, wood and latex paint.

Sadly, the show closes tomorrow. In the other large gallery space at Equinox I found ‘Winter: Works on Paper’ and was delighted to find three drawings by Philippe Raphanel. They are so different from the paintings he has made on platters!

Paul Mathieu had explained to me that it is Reading Week at ECU so he wouldn’t be there yesterday but that I should definitely go and see the ceramic show in the 2nd floor Leshgold gallery. I wasn’t able to visit the ceramics department as the doors are locked, even though I saw students working within.

Masaomi Yasunaga is a Japanese ceramic artist who has exhibited extensively in Japan and recently had his first US solo exhibition at Nonaka-Hill in Los Angeles. This show, ‘Empty Landscape’, is the first time his work has been shown in Canada. Extraordinarily, his work is all about functional forms and sculpture but is made of all manner of ceramic materials, all except clay! He uses glaze elements and rocks, digging into a bed of rock or sand and filling the cavities with glaze-like materials. They are fired and then, like an archaeological dig, the finished forms are excavated.

The gallery has a berm of gravel almost dividing the floor space and atop this are displayed his organic, vessel-like, crunchy forms. Here are a few photos to give you an idea of them. On one wall some more pieces are displayed. These are clearly all glaze. It’s fascinating to imagine the process of controlling the material so that animal or vessel forms result.

This show will remain in ECU’s Libby Leshgold Gallery until March 29th 2020. Visitors to the Canadian Clay Symposium on March 21st may want to see it before or after the full Saturday at Shadbolt Centre in Burnaby.

I enjoyed a quiet lunch in the student café before a speedy half-hour drive home before rush hour. I still had time to unwrap Eric and Philippe’s plates and add them to the already packed kiln and turn on a bisque firing. (All the Raiders’ plates are getting a second bisque along with Philippe’s waxed ones.. it’ll make sure there’s no smudging of their underglaze work. Also my plates and jugbirds need a first bisque firing and Jay MacLennan has insisted that any pots for re-fire in the soda kiln be bisqued too.)

I was pleased to see Eric’s latest bold platter and delighted to see that Philippe has done a drawing on a small plate. That’s a first for him. He has used an underglaze pencil.. and boy, look at that detail! It was a nice coincidence that I’d seen three of his drawings on paper just a couple of hours earlier.

The bisque firing ended today and I shall have a big glazing job in a day or two before the glaze firing. The Raiders have had to wait for me to get the kiln filled but it’ll be worth it! I can’t wait to see my own paper-resist experiments too.