By Don Urquhart, Times Chronicle
For West Kootenays artist Joie Pare art has always been a part of her life, drawing and sketching since she was virtually a toddler. But in all the intervening years she never pursued the full potential her artistic talent, that was at least until she moved to the Kootenays.
“I’ve never really gone beyond pencil and pen until I moved up to the West Kootenays, in 2014 and began painting in 2015,” she says. And the reason appears commonsense: “I had the focus, I had the inspiration and I had the space”. Surely something every artist can relate to.
She says she did enter some competitions with her drawings, at local fairs and such, but she never pushed it any further.
A big impetus for her in her move to acrylic on canvas was a critique by famed wildlife artist Robert Bateman who described some of her works as “masterful” and “exquisite”. She adds that one of things Bateman said was that she paints like he does. “That’s huge, huge. I almost fainted!” she says. Not bad at all for a self-taught artist.
One of the things that she says had a key impact on her was growing up and spending a lot of time out in the bush. Although it may seem pedestrian being from Maple Ridge, those unfamiliar with the area might be surprised at the rugged wilderness that is literally the back yard of Maple Ridge.
Lacking any formal art training, Pare spent a lot of time studying the techniques of wildlife artists including Bateman, Carl Brenders, Daniel Smith (no not that one), Randi Fehr and Terry Isaac from Penticton.
She notes that in particular a book written by Isaac titled “Drama Painting Wildlife” was a “huge tool for me when I very first started”. She says that once she did her first painting – overwhelming at the time – she thought to herself, “maybe I can actually do this.” And from there it was a continual process of honing her skills bit-by-bit she says.
Some of Pare’s work has an almost dark or moody feel to it, of which she says with a laugh, “a lot of people tell me that!”
She says it could be the dark podcasts she listens to while painting. But probably it’s more the fact that she likes contrasting lights and darks – “I like the lights in the darks.” And another key aspect, “there is a mood when you’re out in the woods, especially when you know giant animals are around, right? So I try to portray that through my paintings”.
So the inevitable question: what does she use for her subject matter? Is it purely out of her imagination or lived experience from being in the woods, perhaps even encounters with wild animals. Truth be told it’s a bit of everything with a dash of social media too.
“I’ve been out in the bush, whether I’ve been hiking or hunting or whatever, and I see something, maybe it’s a cluster of rocks or a piece of dead fall or something and I need to paint that, and then I’ll put an animal in it,” she relates.
“I don’t often actually have the time to take pictures of animals, because they’re usually pretty fleeting,” she adds.
She saw a social media video of two bears fighting in nature and that provided inspiration and knowledge too. “There was something about the movement, the tenacity,” she says.
I return to one thing she mentioned earlier in passing: Hunting. I suggest to Pare that hunting seems somehow contradictory to wildlife art. But for her hunting is not a sport, it’s something she does for food and she notes, hunting is also part of conservation.
And this is where an interesting thing comes to light. She says that in order to hunt, “you must understand the movements, the behaviours and the environment that these animals live in.”
And so through this process of hunting she has become a better painter, a more accurate painter in the portrayal of the animals she paints.
“I can make my paintings more scientifically accurate, so it actually informs my art,” she says, citing an example of a painting of an Elk she did a long time ago, before she was a hunter. “Now when I look at it, I’m like, oh, that’s so wrong,” she chuckles. “The antlers, muscular structure, and little things that people might not notice, but I notice,” and other hunters or animal people would see it, she says.
Pare says she’s content to continue her artistic pursuit at the pace it’s unfolding and with orders for commissioned pieces starting to roll in, that seems a happy situation.
Joie Pare’s works are currently on display at the C21 Pop-Up Art Show at 8317 Main St., Osoyoos from Mon-Fri. 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.. Pare will be on hand for an Artist’s Talk on July 3 during the Osoyoos First Friday Art Walk at 5 p.m.
