Tom Gale, "Malcolm’s Meadow," no date
oil on canvas, 16" x 40"
Don’t expect a lot of art talk from Edmonton’s Tom Gale. A landscape painter, he expresses his feelings intuitively as he seeks to capture a moment he has spent out in nature.
He points to experience – the sense of oneness he feels in the natural world, but also the isolation of being apart from it – in the way he handles paint, smearing or scraping it, layering on more colour, and repeating the process. While his paintings present recognizable views, they are more expressive than realistic.
The scenes he paints, like those in an upcoming two-person show, Home, at the Front Gallery in Edmonton until Feb. 1, are straightforward. A row of trees is silhouetted against distant hills in one, while another shows a path leading into a scenic valley.
Tom Gale, "Morning Glow," no date
oil on canvas, 16" x 40"
Gale takes photos when he is out and about, sometimes as he rides his bike during summers spent at a friend’s place in the Shuswap region of the B.C. Interior, and then works up his paintings back in the solitude of his studio.
He’s been an artist for 40 years, mainly doing landscapes, most of them cheerful. He recalls struggling to paint scenes in the aftermath of the 2006 windstorm in Vancouver’s Stanley Park, wondering how to portray the fallen trees and the magnitude of the destruction.
Mostly, he’s happy with his work. “In my critical moments, sometimes I feel like I’m painting quite hokey,” he says. “But, generally, I can get beyond that.”
His drive to keep his work fresh probably helps. Mostly self-taught, apart from some continuing education courses at the University of Alberta in the early 1980s, he has been experimenting recently with making marks, which he calls “little scribbles,” while the paint is wet.
“I try to make my painting new every time,” he says. ■
Home, an exhibition by Tom Gale and Kari Duke, is on view from Jan. 10 to Feb. 1, 2019 at the Front Gallery in Edmonton.