Close Encounters

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Ian Rawlinson “Pioneer,” 2017

acrylic on panel, 26” x 36”

A chance encounter with a moose by the side of the highway was the inspiration for a new body of work by Saskatoon painter Ian Rawlinson. He saw the moose as he drove back from Waskesiu Lake in Prince Albert National Park after a weekend visit with his father. Just past Prince Albert, as night was falling, he heard an ambulance and turned down his high beams.

Suddenly, beside him, was a looming presence. “I saw this massive bullmoose lit up by the night sky,” Rawlinson recalls. Then it was gone. “I was like, did I see him or not,” he says. “It was very ephemeral.”

Life, with its mysterious chance meetings can be like that. But this enigmatic vision continued to haunt Rawlinson.

He wanted to capture it somehow in paint, but wasn’t sure how to proceed. At the time he was creating night scenes of the city, enjoying a good run with shows at the Mendel Art Gallery and Art Placement in Saskatoon, as well as Edmonton’s Bugera Matheson Gallery, where his show, Close Encounters, is on view from June 2 to June 16.

It took years for Rawlinson to find his path to this new way of working. The paintings are varied, demonstrating the range of his search, but the best ones capture something surreal.

Rawlinson, who graduated in 1992 with a Bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the University of Saskatchewan, is fascinated by the animal's long face and improbable antlers, as well as its odd configuration, particularly the contrast between its powerful body and delicate feet. “It’s as if you put Arnold Schwarzenegger in stilettos,” he says.

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Ian Rawlinson “The Searchers,” 2017

acrylic on panel, 32” x 48”

Rawlinson's moose are large, typically filling his birch panels. Often juxtaposed with a highway that stretches through the prairie landscape, they look almost like cutouts, a few steps up from a road sign. Rawlinson draws the silhouette and fills it with conte that he rubs into the wood, leaving the grain visible. The form, evoked but not fully described, is velvety and imperturbable, much like the animals themselves.

He adds the landscape in paint flattened with a touch of gesso. Perspective is often created by a narrowing wedge of highway that disappears into a distant horizon line.

Rawlinson has explored the addition of other animals – crows, magpies, geese, even the occasional hare. These works feel less surreal and more narrative, perhaps because of the Western tradition of children’s animal stories. His creatures, though, seem to lack agency as moral instructors. Instead, they are curiously embedded in their own unfathomable tales. ■

Ian Rawlinson’s exhibition, Close Encounters, runs June 2 to June 16, 2018 at the Bugera Matheson Gallery in Edmonton.