National Post, Monday, January 17, 2005, Arts and Life 1


Curate thyself

A new exhibition aims to get Canada's art buyers thinking
outside the gallery and inside their own living rooms

By Samantha Grice, Arts & Life Reporter, National Post


Harold Klunder,The Fearless Wisdom of a Windy Day

Curator Michael Gibson orginally envisioned himself going around the gallery during the exhibition and removing art from the walls and then putting it back up. But a sequence on his Web site of a living room first displayed with a blank wall and then a Harold Klunder abstract, above, aptly illustrates the energy a piece of art can inject.


The first painting Dr. Ross Woodman ever bought was a small still life from an art museum in London, Ont. That was more than 50 years ago; the piece cost him $5 and was painted by the museum's curator.

One day not long after that purchase, Woodman, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Western Ontario, paused in front of the still life hanging on his wall and asked it, "'Would you like to have some company?' And I found a painting that really talked to this one," he recalls. "And that's how it all began."

Today, there is not a spare bit of wall space in his home to accommodate another piece of art, but that doesn't stop him and his wife from buying. When they get something new, they give something else to a museum or gallery.

"It was an extraordinary thing," he says of the still life. "Just to have something as still as that, something you could go back to every day that was just the way you left it, and yet at the same time you began to see more in it."

Woodman is, in the truest meaning of the word, an art collector (an awful term, he admits, loaded with pomposity). And last Friday night he was one of five art enthusiasts invited to talk at a most original exhibition, Collecting Art 101, at London's Michael Gibson Gallery.

For the show, a slew of mid-20th-century and modernist furniture was borrowed from nearby retailers, and gallery staff arranged the space into domestic vignettes that one might find in any home (living room, den, dining room) in an effort to get Canadians thinking about living with art in their own family rooms.

But the purpose of the exhibit is threefold--it also aims to educate visitors on the hows and whys of collecting original art, and, of course, show new works from a number of artists.

For the rest of the month, the front gallery will be furnished with two intimate sitting rooms and a dining room and will display mixed media, photography and abstract paintings by David Urban.

The middle gallery has been dressed as a cozy den with big, bold oil and canvas landscapes and an abstract by Harold Klunder.
Shari Hatt, Dogs, and Jeff Winch, Sleepwalk series
The third gallery features photography by left, Shari Hatt, "Dogs", and right, Jeff Winch, "Sleepwalk".

In the back gallery, one can relax on the Barcelona chairs and take in the multi-media display. And further back, Gibson's office has been decorated as a sleek, modernist '60s-style lounge complete with "hard-edge" art. This is where Woodman explained to the invited guests how he moved from looking at art to acquiring art to becoming a discerning collector.

"There is a danger in doing this, because it can reduce art to interior decorating," Woodman admits. "And there is a tendency to think about buying a painting because it matches the drapes or the sofa." (If that's your goal, he suggests buying a pillow, which is much cheaper and will do a better job.) But, Woodman concedes, the average person often views a painting in a gallery or museum at such a distance from their life that it never occurs to them that they could hang something similar in their home. This, he says, is a particularly Canadian affliction.

"I think a lot of Canadians think art in Canada is the Group of Seven. And so when they think of art, they think of something in a museum. That's where they think it belongs," he says. "But then rarely do they even go to see art in a museum. If you go to the AGO you'll see 10 times more people in the gallery shop or the cafeteria than in the museum."

This is where Gibson comes in. "Michael knows how difficult it is and what a huge step it is to buy a painting, to buy an original piece of art," says Woodman of Gibson, who opened his gallery 20 years ago.

And while most curators are aware the average person is too intimidated to show up at an art opening or pop in for a browse, Gibson takes that understanding one step further with Collecting Art 101. "I go to galleries, but the majority of people don't," he says.

"So we are trying to say, if you give us a couple of hours of your time, we'll expose you to something you can build on for the rest of your life, expand your horizons or simply meet some artists."

Gibson likens the art buyer's first foray to that of the novice wine taster or the virgin jazz listener who inaugurates his collection with Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. "Listen to that a hundred times and it actually starts to sound better," says Gibson. "Then, of course, you're going to try something else, and you get a little more daring as you go along. Typically, collectors start out with representational landscape paintings and end up buying abstract work that is more daring."

Collecting Art 101 is geared to that novice. Gibson sees a huge learning curve between a collector such as Woodman and the person who has never bought art before. "You really need help along the way," he says. "What to buy, what not to buy and then you have to develop your own taste. People assume they know what they like, but you have to live with it and many grow with it or grow away from it."

To emphasize the vast difference between living with a blank wall and a wall with art, Gibson originally envisioned himself going around the gallery during the exhibition and removing art from the walls and then putting it back up. A timed sequence on his Web site (www.gibsongallery.com) of the living-room vignette--first displayed with a blank wall and then with a Klunder abstract--illustrates the energy one piece can inject.

"Every painting I have collected [that has stayed] has not only changed the room in which it is," says Woodman, "but it has changed me."

And that, says Gibson, sums up the simplicity of this event. "A room with art, a room without art," he says. "Of course, it's not about decorating or hanging a pretty picture above the couch, but about acquiring something and knowing you're the only person in the world that has this piece. There is only one and I happen to own it and love it."



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