D. HELEN MACKIE RCA: THE PRINTMAKER'S HAND
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Willock & Sax Gallery 210 Bear Street PO Box 2469, Banff, Alberta T1L 1C2
Celebrate Canada 150 for December highlights the career and works of printmaker D. Helen Mackie RCA.
ARTIST RECEPTION SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2 TO 4 PM
Castle Carolers will also be present to sing seasonal songs.
The Willock & Sax Gallery’s final exhibition of Celebrate Canada 150 salutes the fine printmaking and painting of D. Helen Mackie RCA. The Printmaker’s Hand encompasses a number of print series as well as watercolors which span her career as an artist from the early 1970s through to the early 2000s.
Her great skill and expertise as a master printmaker, influenced by a background in biological sciences, enlarged on a life-long fascination with mountain and prairie culture as well as the natural world: the plants, animals, birds, people, the life cycles in nature – a veritable life’s tapestry. “While not interested in pure abstraction, she does abstract and simplify all her subjects” into her own vocabulary (Roed Cochrane, 102).” Although she denies any poetic approach, Mackie visualizes (makes visible) nature’s rhythms and reveals spiritual and symbolic points of reference that fill in our own realities. She embraces the common and everyday to fashion, through the medium of the woodblock print, etching, watercolor and charcoal drawing, imaginary worlds of surprise, interconnectivity, whimsy, and joy.
Mackie’s strong images, in conjunction with her use of color (often with a stencil technique), contain high levels of energy and denote her compassionate nature and keen sense of humor. Referencing various visual techniques from the history of art, such as the registers from illuminated medieval manuscripts and books of hours, Helen’s subjects shift the traditional scenes from the lives of the Virgin, Christ, and any number of saints, to take in the activities of moose, crows, cows, and horses, as well as cowboys, children, mice, flowers, and gardeners.
She states that the art of printmaking “opened my eyes to a new world of images and new opportunities to create.” For Helen the block of wood and the etcher’s plate kept her “contact with idea, hand, and image very close.”
Mackie is an alumna of the University of Calgary, the University of Toronto and Queen’s University, member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Artists (RCA) and the Alberta Society of Artists (ASA), and has studied at The Banff Centre, Alberta College of Art & Design, and the Emma Lake Workshops.
We are pleased that D. Helen Mackie will be in our gallery this Saturday; we invite you to attend.