ROBERT MARCHESSAULT, March 3 to 24, 2012, Bau Xi Gallery, Vancouver

Bau Xi Gallery, Vancouver

March 3 to 24, 2012

By Janet Nicol

When Robert Marchessault and his partner moved from Toronto to a farm in the countryside in the 1990s, his long-held passion for trees found new direction. This exhibition shows 15 of his new oil paintings on wooden panels, all ethereal renderings of those trees. “These are not photograph-based,” Marchessault emphasizes. “I use memory as a filtering agent. I train myself to look hard at the trees and at what impresses me. Time goes by and I begin to paint the tree from what I can remember. Memory plays a big role but I am not slavish about memory. I study ways the tree lives and grows, how it branches, moves through space in foliage and form. Then I begin big gestural paintings, and memory informs what emerges.” Marchessault’s love of trees was partly inspired by an Ontario government no-cost tree-planting initiative. He and his partner planted 7,000 saplings on their farm in 1984. He now looks out on to 50-foot-high pines. “You take on a nurturing of the land,” Marchessault says of his private forest. “You’re introducing life and protecting it. This feeling of love drives a passion for art.” Marchessault has also become intrigued by representing water as a foil to trees. New paintings of tree-covered islands appeal to him because they seem ‘mysterious.’