"Sleepwalker"
Galen Felde, "Sleepwalker," acrylic on wood panel 21" X 46".
GALEN FELDE, This Brief Dance
Bellevue Gallery, West Vancouver
February 12 to March 14, 2009
By Beverly Cramp
Blurred trees dissolving into the background, a bird figure, mesh wire, a telephone pole. These are elements in Galen Felde’s latest canvases, a continuation of her examination of our relatively brief time here, and our difficult relationship with nature. Or at least, that’s one interpretation. “I don’t like to be didactic about my work,” Felde says from her Vancouver eastside studio. “Although I have a fairly specific intention when I create a painting, I prefer to let people decide what they’re seeing.” Felde uses urban imagery and natural elements to engage ideas of identity and context, who we are and where we live. “The work is [about] the place we live and an attempt to bring us into the moment — to be thoughtful but also to enjoy it.” She mixes the human and the natural in a continuing fascination with crows. Felde sees representations of people in the birds, and their attraction to urban environments. “The crow imagery I use is intended to describe a contradiction in humans. We come from nature, but seem to end up so far from it.”