Local potter Katie Foster (left) and Jane Scheffler are exhibiting at the Osoyoos Art Gallery starting on Saturday. (Richard McGuire file photo)
Two Osoyoos artists – a painter and a potter – will be featured in the Osoyoos Art Gallery’s new exhibition opening Saturday.
The show, “Home and Away,” includes pottery and multimedia by Katie Foster and paintings by Jane Scheffler, inspired by their travels abroad and by the Okanagan.
“We’ve both travelled to Italy and Jane has travelled to many countries in Europe,” said Foster. “I have some pieces that reflect the buildings in Italy. Of course I have a lot of pieces that are fruit oriented and flowers, and that’s ‘home’ of course. Jane has a lot of scenery pictures from around here. So we just thought it was an appropriate name for the show.”
Although the two different artistic media contrast with each other, there are complementary themes and the two artists like similar colours.
“She has a poppy painting and I have a sculpted piece of poppies,” said Foster. “Our work might have similarities, but different mediums make it interesting.”
Scheffler said she only paints, usually in acrylics, although she’s been returning to watercolours.
Foster, who is known for her colourfully painted plates and life-sized pottery pears and apples, describes her work more as “mixed media.”
“I have various types of framing and I use old relics in my work sometimes,” Foster said. “A lot of my pieces are mounted on old wood and I have some recycled metal that I treat with acid and use the results as a background.”
Lately her style has been evolving away from the functional pieces such as plates and she works more with ceramic slabs.
These, she said, might be rectangles of pottery that are painted and may have raised, three-dimensional elements.
“If I do a rendition of an Italian storefront or farmhouse, I may have raised shutters,” she said.
Scheffler is likely the more travelled of the two. She’s visited many European countries, other parts of Canada and Arizona where she’ll go on walking tours, taking along her sketchbook.
She may do sketches or watercolours on her travels or take photos instead if the weather is unco-operative, and she’ll develop these into paintings when she gets home.
Her preferred subjects are old buildings and landscapes.
“Mostly it’s the natural world that I like or the old world. I love the old stone walls and the fields in Europe, the light that you see in Italy and France,” Scheffler said. “Usually I stay out of the cities as much as possible.”
On a recent trip she took the South West Coast Path through Devon and Cornwall in England. She’s also walked through the parks in Arizona and has driven and walked in places like southern France and Portugal.
She describes her paintings as realist.
“I’m not an abstract painter in any sense,” said Scheffler. “I did watercolours when I first started and then I moved to acrylics for brighter colours. Now I’m back doing a bit of pen and ink and watercolour.”
Both artists say the show will feature a wide range of their work from recent years.
“It should be quite a nice colourful show,” said Foster. “This isn’t our first rodeo together.”
Last summer the two artists showed their work together at Foster’s studio and garden during Art in the Garden, along with a couple other local artists.
Both artists are self-taught, becoming artists later in life as their careers wound down. Both are originally from the coast and have lived throughout Western Canada.
Foster comes from a corporate background, which has included such diverse roles as being a regional manager with B.C. Lottery Corporation, a financial manager with a Kelowna women’s shelter and working for Epcor, the Edmonton-based utility.
She came to Osoyoos in 2002, a couple years after she started dabbling in pottery.
Before moving to Osoyoos, she began sending her work to her sister in Kelowna, who took it to the market to sell.
“She said, ‘you’d better get busy because people are buying this stuff like crazy,’” Foster recalls. “So that’s how it got started and it just evolved from there.”
Scheffler, a veterinarian, came to Osoyoos in 1990 and ran the animal clinic here before selling to Henry Kleinhofmeyer five years ago.
She took up painting when she moved here, but didn’t do as much while she was working.
Home and Away runs from Saturday, Jan. 9 to Saturday, Jan. 30. There is an opening reception on Saturday from noon to 2 p.m.
The Osoyoos Art Gallery is located at 8713 Main Street and winter hours are Tuesday to Saturday from noon to 4 p.m.
RICHARD McGUIRE
Osoyoos Times
