Butchart trip led local artist down the garden path
Branching out from still-life paintings to lush, flowery landscapes

Gilbert A. Bouchard, Freelance

Nola Cassady’s love of gardening finds expression in her new display.

Photograph by : Rick MacWilliam, The Journal

NOLA CASSADY: HOUSE OF THE GREEN GARDEN

Showing at: Common Sense Gallery, 10546 115th St.

Until: Dec. 13

Painter Nola Cassady is enjoying blooming good times in 2008.

“I’m having a lot of fun and a very happy year,” says the Edmonton artist. “I just got married, have a brand-new studio and have been travelling. The world’s a very beautiful place and it reflects in the work.”

The work in question is 13 mid-sized pastel and watercolour landscapes of verdant garden scenes from her aforementioned travels in Victoria, the city of Scarsdale in New York State, and Ireland.

Cassady, an avid and longtime gardener, went out of her way to seek beautiful gardens in all of her travels, then set out to create a series of loose and expressionistic flowery landscapes that are on display at the Common Sense Gallery.

This show of landscapes is a bit of a departure from the oil still-life paintings and large-scale portraits you’ve done in the past. What led you down this particular artistic path?

I’ve been painting still-lifes and portraits since I graduated from the University of Alberta in 1997, but always admired landscapes. Last summer, I moved into a new studio and decided that I wanted to do something different and opened myself up to something free and different that would be inspired by the new space. What that turned out to be was these flower landscapes initially inspired by my trip to Victoria and the Butchart Gardens. I was really floored by my visit and how everything was all in bloom. I took hundreds of photos until my camera died and decided to see if I could capture artistically what I had seen.

You’ve use the term “botanical portraits” to describe these flower landscapes. Do you see this work as being a bit of a hybrid?

Working on these images sees me bringing in things that I was using in my still-life and portrait work. All my painting is about colour and patterns and mark-making. With these landscapes, though, I’m working hard to not get too finicky, too precious. I’m seeing how little information I can bring to the page and still get my point across to the viewer.

These aren’t all Victoria landscapes, are they?

I went on a trip to upstate New York in May and then to Ireland in June, both of which are represented in this show. When I started looking at landscapes as a subject matter, I started seeing landscapes everywhere I went. Also, I love gardening and am from a family of gardeners so it comes very naturally to me to paint flower gardens.

Can you tell me a bit about how you work with things like colour, composition and texture in your flower landscapes?

I had a studio mate a while back who taught me how to use muddy colours to balance out the bright, vibrant colours. As for composition, I choose images where I can contrast different elements and have some artistic challenges conveying them. For example, it’s fun to see how you can translate to a painting how some plants are fuzzy while others are shiny. I’m also working really hard to respect both the image as a whole as well as the individual objects, the flowers themselves, in these paintings. I see myself as a documentarian of the garden.