Tom Gale & Neil McClelland

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Left: Tom Gale, “Garden View,” no date; Right: Neil McClelland, “The Arterial Angel,” no date

Left: oil on canvas, 24" × 30"; Right: oil on canvas, 59" × 26" (courtesy of the Gallery)

Curatorial Statement

Gale and McClelland’s work is harmoniously intertwined in this showcase of established painters. Tom’s work delves deep into impressionist landscapes that come together like pieces of a puzzle while Neil explores a more wild and unruly garden world. This show brings together a pairing of artists whose creations compliment each other and weave together a true appreciation for the beauty of nature

Neil McClelland 

The human delight in gardens has a long history, as does painting these either carefully composed or tangled spaces. Gardens can be places for admiring and showing off beauty. They are also reflections and products of human connections to soil, nature and land and ideas around conservation and sustainability. Increasingly we wonder about the possible sentience of the plants that inhabit them. The source material for my project derives from gardens I’ve visited, locally and internationally. In my work, the flowering plants are imagined characters with complexity and presence, each with its own relationship to the surrounding world and cosmos. These characters emerge within photography, digitization, and drawing processes in my art practice that involve layering and combining images. The resulting images are composites, reflective of the experience of being in a garden, of embodied looking as one moves through a space in which perception is multiple and cumulative. The paintings are foremost expressions of joy, and of awe and wonder at the interconnectedness and interdependence of everything, of earth and cosmos and our place in it.

Tom Gale

This most recent collection of Tom’s work demonstrates his endless pursuit of discovery as an artist. Born in Medicine Hat, Alberta in 1946. Tom has been painting for 40 years, the last 25 in Edmonton. Painting scenes from our local parks and natural areas as well as a great deal from Cherryville, B.C. he transforms these everyday scenes into expressive and dynamic works of art. There is no still moment in his paintings. each section dancing or bending as if the wind were actually moving within it.

His work can be found in numerous local, national and international private and public collections. Some public collections are: The Alberta Art Foundation, Canadian Utilities Ltd., Chase Communications, Place Crete Inc., Royal Alex Hospital and many others.