By Don Urquhart, Times Chronicle
The Okanagan Art Gallery is incredibly easy to miss, even walking down the sidewalk never mind driving by. Where it sits on Main St., wedged between substantially more visible stores and cafes, its single door is the only street facing exposure other than the name at the end of the awning of the Bella Dora Building.
In fact its hidden nature has prompted more than one Osoyoos-ite to comment that they had no idea the gallery was even located there, has in turn prompted the 26-artist cooperative to take up the suggestion by the gallery’s Diane Carter to rename it the OAG Hidden Door Gallery.
Hidden Door Gallery (Don Urquhart photo)
The commercial art gallery just passed its six year anniversary and one of the founding members, Michael Jordan explains that it has its roots in a gallery that was started about 11 years ago in Oliver by artist Steve Staresina.
“We had painted a little bit together in Oliver and he had this idea to start a real art gallery and I said yeah it’s a great idea count me in. He said, ‘that’s great because I’ve already got a space I’m taking a lease on a storefront right across from the Cock and Bull [now the Ditch Cafe]’,” Jordan chuckles.
It took them nearly three months to get the space inhabitable and workable, he says. “It took four or five of us putting a lot of sweat equity into it.” The gallery ran for nearly five years with Jordan explaining the first three years they enjoyed increasing sales each year, but in the fourth year sales plateaued and in the fifth year business began sliding with less traffic and a concomitant drop in sales.
It then dawned on them that it was Osoyoos where they should be, given the more significant tourism that flowed through town. A long story short, they found a former lawyer’s office that had been sitting empty for a couple of years and signed a lease.
“It’s a perfect space and we’ve done a lot of work on the building,” Jordan says. This includes experimenting with different wall colours, putting in new lighting and putting in skylights in the six individual rooms giving each a nice wash of natural light. Indeed the six rooms give the gallery a wonderful element of discovery as visitors wend their way through what seems like an endless warren of art.
The decision to establish a fully commercial gallery in Osoyoos was a logical one that forms another piece of the town’s tourism puzzle. And as Jordan notes, it nicely complements the town’s Art Gallery Osoyoos up the street.
Business has been good and perhaps surprisingly sales actually increased during the pandemic. “I think people were looking for things they could spend money on because they couldn’t travel and a lot of things they couldn’t do.”
Just recently Jordan sold a couple large paintings to a couple from Switzerland which is one of his first international sales. “It makes me feel kind of chuffed!”, he says quite justifiably.
Jordan notes that his paintings appeal to a particular taste, given that his subject matter revolves almost exclusively around “western” themes like ranching and horses. “Horses are my muse,” he says.
While he considers himself to be “serious” about painting, it’s really only something he devoted more time to after he retired from a career in urban planning. An odd juxtaposition to his western-themed paintings perhaps.
But on this topic he relates that one of the things he’s most proud of is the fact he paid for the first two years of his university education “working on a ranch on the back of a horse”.
Moving on to the room next door, artist Dorothy Tinning is busy painting a piece based on her recent visit to Haida Gwaii.
Before we can talk about that, my attention is caught by one of her paintings of Spotted Lake. “I’ve painted Spotted Lake seven times and I just can’t do enough of it,” she says with a laugh.
And while horses are Jordan’s muse, landscapes are Tinning’s inspiration. “I do acrylic on canvas mostly, that’s my medium. . . I love the flexibility of canvas, it’s kind of springy, it seems alive,” she explains.
Our conversation turns back to Haida Gwaii where she spend six days and enthuses she could have easily stayed a month. The windswept beaches like the painting of Agate Beach on the far end of Graham Island that she is currently working on, were chock-full of inspiration, she says.
“Sometimes the waves were just pounding in and and you could hear the little pebbles making a sound as they were pulled out by the waves. You listen to that and you really do feel like you’re at the end of the world,” she says.
“Normally I do Okanagan landscapes, I love the Okanagan, this is where I live. But it was beautiful to go out there, there is so much inspiration up there,” she said, adding that the old growth forests with the big cedar trees draped with moss was “cathedral-like”.
It also meant a bit of a refresher from her normal colour pallet. “The colours are so different. It’s a lot of warm colours what I normally do, but from there there’s a lot more blues and some grays.”
Tinning says she will do about six paintings from her trip which can take her up to three weeks per painting to finish. “I just have to go slow and be patient,” she says of the beach scene she is working on. “Most of the pebbles will just be in the background and I’ll focus on some nice ones in the front because otherwise it will kill me doing all the rocks in detail,” she laughs.
There seems to be this common thread. Speaking to Carmen Tome about her graphite drawing of a car travelling down a backcountry road deep in the forests of B.C., she says it took her three days to finish, “but there’s so much detail that it was actually driving me nuts and I couldn’t wait to finish.”
Carmen Tome (Don Urquhart photo)
And indeed the detail is stunning, just looking at the artwork I’m transported to a dusty logging road enclosed on both sides by towering evergreens.
When asked what her style is, she says: “I’m known for diversifying techniques and subject matter.” What does that mean? “It means you can’t pin me down to one style, she says. And indeed, oil, acrylic, graphite drawing, photography are all within her artistic bag.
Realism and hyper-realism are clearly part of her artistic mix. “When it comes to realism I’m like a dog with a bone, I just don’t finish until it’s perfect,” she says.
Having just recently finished the graphite drawing I ask her what’s next. “I have some ideas for the next one. I have a lot of abstract work that I have done and I’m going to deliberately use them as background for realism and do something unique. And I might add gold foil to it, but I’m not going to say anymore. I’m a bit of a mad scientist,” she concludes.
The OAG Hidden Door Gallery holds a special First Saturday reception on the first Saturday of every month 5-7 p.m. where some of the artists are present and often working on their artwork. Wine by the glass for purchase and complimentary snacks are provided.
