The immensity of the Arctic has provided fodder for artist Janet Read, who will bring more than 40 paintings to the Agnes Jamieson Gallery for an exhibition that will be on display from March 26 to May 23.
Read travelled to the high Arctic in 2018, 2023, and 2025. Those trips have helped form a body of work.
She told The Highlander she did the journeys by ship with Zodiac trips ashore.
“You have those wonderful expanses of ocean, and places such as Devlin Island come to mind. It’s like a layer cake with sedimentary rock dusted with snow. And it is almost a desert environment. It can be ocean to a mile-high sky if it’s clear.”
The Innisfil-based artist has named her exhibit ‘mute eloquence of light.’ She got the name from Christine Ritter’s memoir A Woman in the Polar Night. A painter, Ritter spent a year in 1934 living in a remote hut in the Arctic with her trapper husband. She coined the phrase.
“It’s a really apt description for the kind of work I do,” Read said of the abstracts she has created from the immensity of the space, and elemental forms of land and water, since there is no real vegetation, save Arctic flora.
Asked about climate change, Read said she is no scientist and three short trips to the Arctic are not evidence-based. However, “the Indigenous people who live there on the front lines are seeing the differences.”
As for the process of her art, Read’s exhibit consists of abstract paintings on linen, panels in oil and acrylic, and hybrid drawings/paintings on Duralar.
“I’m dropping graphite powder and wiping with paper towel. I’m using my fingers. I’m using solvent and sometimes I stab the brush to get a drip,” she said of some of her techniques – aimed at achieving a translucency.
She added she hopes the work inspires emotion; “people who have been to the Arctic really react to it as being true to the experience.”
For those who have not ventured to the Far North, she hopes to inspire curiosity about the region and maybe they will visit it themselves one day. She aims to raise awareness about geopolitical ramifications, in places such as Greenland.
But really, her work is about “the beauty of the place, the awe and the wonder,” and she hopes gallery visitors feel that. She said she was delighted the gallery accepted her submission.
Shannon Kelly, manager of cultural services with Minden Hills, said the official opening reception with the artist talk will take place April 11 from 1-3 p.m.
“Improvisation and spontaneous abstract mark-making visualize the processes of wind and water relating her experiences of the high Arctic in Canada and the Greenlandic west coast. These works extend earlier themes initiated by residencies in Newfoundland and western Ireland,” Kelly said.
She added, “abstraction conveys an emotional and poetic response to the environment. It is mediated imaginative experience, recreated as visual works. What do you see? What do you feel? Are you moved to action?”
Learn more: www.janet-read.com
The Agnes Jamieson Gallery is at 176 Bobcaygeon Rd., Minden and is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission by donation.
