MacCulloch paints sunsets for first time

You want to step into dreamy landscapes

By ELISSA BARNARD Arts Reporter | At the Galleries

Sara MacCulloch tackles sunsets with great success in paintings of the Annapolis Valley that make you wish you could walk right into the canvas.

Once reluctant to paint dusk for fear it would be too romantic or sentimental, the lyrical landscape painter decided to try it for this exhibit at Studio 21.

"There are a couple of cottages that we have been going to every year — here and in Ontario," she says. "They have become the subjects I return to again and again. It is only by spending blocks of time in one place that I can really start to get a feel for it."
She has painted sunset because "it is only in those two weeks or so that I am staying in nature that I get to see that time of day in the landscape — so it has become important to me."

MacCulloch’s Kingsport area paintings at sunset are dreamy rural landscapes in multiple greens and blues with bands of fields and occasional farm houses. How she tells her story is as interesting as what she says with visible swaths of brushstrokes, loose, wriggly, green lines and dabs of earthy browns in dense green foregrounds and traces of ridges and drips of paint.

Her style is subtle, delicate colours and light, with the exception of a brooding heavy purplish sky above a band of pale, peachy light, in Kingsport Sunset. The sunsets are a creamy, pale yellow and you can feel the heat of day fading slowly.

MacCulloch has also painted forest scenes with giant Group of Seven-like trees that, in one painting, dwarf a small, lit cottage, a refuge from the wilderness.

Unusual mixed media on board paintings by Susan Szenes in her show, Between Two Worlds, in Gallery 2, connect vaguely to MacCulloch’s in the presence of a vacationer’s trailer.

Szenes, however, is using American vintage travel trailers as an emblem of the 1950s as she mixes sci-fi imagery with that of developing urban centres.

Trailers with windows that contain maps are posed with finely drawn super heroes, space craft and Star Wars characters like the white storm troopers. Szenes, a Toronto artist with a background in graphic design, also uses patterned papers and linoleum that recall the past, and she erodes the found wood on which she works. Texturally and visually a lot is going on in these sweet, imaginative and talkative paintings.

In her juxtapositions of subject matter she wants to depict opposing forces of "urban and rural and wild and tamed environments."