Liminal Spaces

Vancouver artist Patricia Johnston's luminous seascapes seek to communicate the transcendental.

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The ocean is a favourite metaphor in spirituality. It's easy to understand why. There is vastness, of course, and unfathomable depths. The water's surface, whether flecked with sunshine or masked by fog, is riddled with waves that evoke the patterns and shifting energies of human life.

Some days the ocean is tranquil – beware the doldrums – while on others, the gales are so formidable it is hard to maintain any sense of balance. Little wonder, then, that artists as diverse as Hokusai, J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich have portrayed its shifting moods.

Vancouver artist Patricia Johnston is also drawn to the ocean. Her seascapes evoke the Pacific Northwest’s characteristic misty tinge, an effect she creates by applying many thin layers of oil paint. In this sense, her paeans to water, the mother energy of the planet, unite polarities,  bringing together two elements that would that would otherwise repel.

Mostly, though, Johnston’s work is about light, which she uses to create a numinous sense of space and possibility.

“I try to communicate the transcendental, the world behind our visible world, the unseen behind the seen,” she says. “There are moments when the world becomes brighter, in sharper focus, and stiller than normally experienced, and I try to catch that ephemeral quality.”

Her show, Liminal Spaces, on view until March 29 at Victoria’s West End Gallery, features spectacular vistas from places like Long Beach, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, as well as the Sunshine Coast and the Inside Passage.

Johnston grew up in what is now Zimbabwe and began painting as a child. “It was just easy for me, just something I couldn’t not do,” she says. She went to Britain to further her studies, and eventually moved to Canada, where she met her husband. She has been based in Vancouver since the 1970s but the West Coast’s cool, shimmering light still astonishes her, especially compared to the harsh, almost colourless light in Zimbabwe. 

While the sublime is not in vogue in contemporary art, Johnston’s paintings speak to age-old yearnings that lurk in the human psyche. “Something deep inside me always responds to being within sight and sound of the ocean,” she says.

Her art is both a way to reach beyond herself into the mysterious and a solace for her despair about how pollution is ravaging the world's oceans. It is, she remarks, her small contribution, her hymn of praise. ■

Liminal Spaces is on view until March 29, 2018 at Victoria’s West End Gallery

West End Gallery, Victoria

1203 Broad Street, Victoria, British Columbia V8W 2A4

250-388-0009

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