Colour Commentary:
Three-artist show takes bold approach

by Alex Browne, Arts Reporter

The three artists gathered at White Rock Gallery for an afternoon chat about their upcoming show share some common ground.

All changed career directions because of a passion for painting, and all have acquired impressive credentials.

Niels Petersen was, until the mid-’90s, a reporter for The Peace Arch News — then made the jump to painting full time.

Netherlands-born Ed Loenen taught art and French in high school, but left full-time teaching in 1992 to pursue his “first love.”

Michael O’Toole studied architectural design at BCIT and even worked for several architectural firms in Toronto, before surrendering to his “all-consuming passion” for painting.

All three have exhibited alone and in collective shows — including the Federation of Canadian Artists Gallery in Vancouver (both Loenen and Petersen have been granted associate status within the Federation). [Gallery note: Michael O’Toole also holds associate status.]

Petersen has shared shows with both Loenen (Brushspokes I and II) and O’Toole (with Ruth Sawatzky).

All three are noted for their bold and vivid approach to colour — Loenen in oils featuring urban scenes; Petersen in paintings featuring both urban and natural landscapes; and O’Toole in sea scenes, architectural studies, many inspired by his travels in the Mediterranean.

They’re all pushing colour to the limit in this show, featuring all new paintings, they promise.

Add to this the fact Petersen and O’Toole have indulged in friendly sparring since they were six or seven years old, and you have the ingredients for a … well, lively discussion, moderated by the courteous, soft-spoken Loenen.

“Do you mind if we throw colours at your?” O’Toole said (fortunately speaking figuratively) as a prelude to an exchange in which the artists, as artists will, debate the merits of specific paint colours.

For instance Petersen extols the virtues of cobalt violet light for imbuing a scene with a late afternoon quality (albeit in sparing use, at $27 per tube).

“The effect,” he said, “is subtle but dazzling.”

They’re all agreed, he added, that “lemon yellow sucks.”

“I love Thalo green for cool reflective light,” O’Toole offers. “It’s a mainstay.”

“A mainstay?” Petersen fires. “Get out!”

Cobalt blue is even more controversial, it seems, with Petersen holding it is a “namby pamby colour” and O’Toole maintaining it’s the “meat and potatoes of blue.”

“What do you think about David Langevin’s article on colour, about not mixing colours,” Loenen ventures.

“I respect it,” O’Toole cautiously offered.

Before I gained the impression a brawl was about to break out, Petersen (whom I know to be fond of playing Devil’s Advocate) assured me “Mike and I have known each other since Grade 2.”

“When we were at school, Niels was the artist and I was focused into architecture,” O’Toole said.

“I drew a lot in elementary school and high school,” Loenen said.

“Did you draw in class?” O’Toole asked. Loenen admitted he did.

“But I sat close to the teachers, and they always looked past me,” he said.

Of the three, Loenen has possibly the most radical approach to colour.

“I’ve been studying it since 1982. I’ve really been concentrating on the tension between red and green and what happens between them.

“I have glasses of double black glass and I put them on to check the values–sometimes I’ll paint a whole painting with the glasses on, once my palette is finished. It frees me to discover whole new triads of colour.”

“I think the strength of colour comes out in the middle values,” O’Toole said.

“That’s the subject matter of what I do. That’s the true sense of an artist — the application of colours in the middle values, not the lights and darks.

“Would you agree with that Niels?”

Petersen admitted he hadn’t been paying that close attention to what O’Toole was saying.

“I was thinking about what colour meant to me,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s about right,” O’Toole offered.

“I like to exaggerate things,” Petersen said.

“Non-artists may look at presumably grey clouds or a blue sea, but if you really look into what seem to be ordinary colours, these other colours come out.”

Petersen and O’Toole agree the colours of the reference photos they use are totally unsatisfactory–a good thing, freeing them to take an entirely personal approach to the colours of the scene based on their own perceptions.

“Regular folks may not know about colours,” O’Toole said.

“But they know what they like. They’ll see the subtleties, they’ll focus in on that. They may not articulate why they like it, but the subtleties will focus their eye to move across the colour and value change.”

A sensitivity to colour becomes irresistible, Loenen said.

“I was at the dentist’s office the other day, looking at their magazine of motorcycles. They have wonderful colours for motorcycles now, fabulous iridescent shades. There was on picture that I sneaked out of the magazine–they had this red light behind a green motorcycle.

“I took it home. I was totally taken with that. That’s how colour can be so exciting to me.”

He counts himself an admirer of the way Cezanne modelled his subjects with progressions from warm to cool colours.

“Mercie beaucoup, M. Cezanne,” he said — noting, however, although the French master’s works are a “feast of colour” his own life was dour and devoid of love.

But then, this is the continuing anomaly of the artist’s daily life and struggle to achieve something on canvas.

“It’s always a struggle,” Petersen said.

“I never know how a painting is going to end up — it’s almost as if it takes on a life of it’s own.

“It’s like having a conversation with the painting — a colour conversation.”