|
THE OPENING is all about introducing the fascinating, quirky and wonderful people working in and around the visual arts in Vancouver. Each week, we'll feature an artist, collective, curator or administrator to delve deep into who and what makes art happen! |
Cloud Studies 2, 1998-2010, Polaroids
Artist Mina Totino is easily one of the most thoughtful artists I've had the pleasure to interview. An avid reader in general, she has a particular interest in history - art and otherwise. From painting to photography, this interest is reflected in everything she does. Our conversation was peppered with references, from German philosopher and socialist Karl Marx to British Romantic painter John Constable. History "is the reason I'm still interested in painting," she notes. While Totino works in a number of mediums including photography and drawing, painting is her most frequent medium. As she puts it, "I've always been a painterly painter. I've always been interested in the matter and the material, probably more than just about anything else."
Burnt Orange Heresy, 2010, oil on canvas, 157 x 157 cm
Totino's paintings at first glance could be described as abstract, but at Totino notes, she is not abstracting anything. Rather her paintings are concerned with gesture, colour and dealing with the space of the canvas itself. Each work is different from every angle and depending on the distance you stand from it. From far away it can look like scribbles of paint with a brush, but from close up the individual strokes can be determined and the difference of tone and shade within those strokes, creating a whole new vista to explore. Drip marks become visible where she flipped the canvas around to sit on another end, making sure the whole canvas retains a lightness rather than becoming bottom-heavy. This also allows her to view the composition from different angles until she determines which one is the better view. While she used to have an idea of what a painting might look like before she began, now she is just trying to paint and let the final composition come to her organically.
A Dry Melancholy, 2011, oil on canvas, 157 x 210 cm
In a way, her method of painting is not unlike a recent Polaroid project she completed last year - photos of clouds from 1998-2010. The entire project consists of about 300 Polaroids (though she's never counted) of white puffs and streaks on a backdrop of blue sky. Individually they are just pretty pictures of clouds taken on a sunny day, but together they create a stunning visual of an ever changing sky. It is akin in lying in the grass on a sunny day and just watching the view above blow by. Totino calls the Polaroids “almost like a lazy girl’s approach to the practice of looking up.” They are being published in three volumes by Publication Studio; the first volume ‘I Look Up’ has already been released. According to Totino, there was no rhyme or reason to her editing for publication, just that the clouds were “not too romantic or too fluffy.” What remains are stunning examples of just letting time and movement pass you by.
Plink, 2011, oil on canvas, 157 x 157 cm
Plink (detail), 2011
Led to art through “a series of accidents,” Totino has also made photos and drawings of people reading Marx, and created monochromes out of chalk from chalk she collected in Germany. She wrote out Kant’s ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ in chalk over several months once, creating a hazy collection of papers both about and depicting the sublime (Totino is left handed, so would end up dragging her hand across the page in the process of writing out the Analytic in chalk, blurring the writing). Her earlier work was more representational than it is now, but even then “I wanted most of it to be quite clearly about a materiality of body and some history of the thought of painting.”
Cloud Studies 2, 1998-2010, Polaroids
In a time when it seems like all art has to have a narrative and an elaborate backstory, Totino just wants to take colour, paint and canvas and create something visual. Visual art didn’t always have an elaborate backstory - painters used to just paint a pretty scene, photographers made photos of stunning landscapes - nothing more than the act of looking and reflecting. Contemporary art is much more interested in narrative in many cases than it is about the visual, and Totino has been inclined to pull away from telling a story. Painting “can stand quite solidly on its own without telling any story whatsoever. You can make a painting that’s just about something very visual and tactile.” Her paintings guide you into following and experiencing the gestures she has used to create them, taking the same looping or scribbling path to reach an appreciation for the materials and their possibilities. It’s a path the audience rarely takes when viewing painting, and I am glad for the open invitation to look.
---------
Mina Totino lives and works in Vancouver. In 1982 she received a diploma in art from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited at Belkin Gallery, Vancouver; Charles H Scott Gallery, Vancouver; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Oboro Gallery, Montreal; Diaz Contemporary, Toronto; Galerie Likofabrik, Berlin; and the Latvian Center of Contemporary Art, Riga.
All images courtesy Mina Totino.
