CARRIE WALKER | WINTER ANIMALS
Carrie Walker collects found landscapes that are rendered in both pencil and watercolour on paper. Onto each landscape she paints or draws an animal into the scene using gouache, an opaque watercolour paint. She attempts to blend the creatures as seamlessly as possible within the existing landscape. Despite this effort, the animals do not belong. They are out of context and out of scale to their surroundings.
“For this suite of drawings”, Walker writes, “I selected winter landscapes and inserted species whose coats change to white in winter. I am always learning about the subjects I paint, and I learned that as the climate shifts and there are fewer days of snow in some regions around the world, these animals’ white coats are out of sync with the snowfall. Mismatched to their environment, they are especially vulnerable to predation or in the case of the predators, less able to hunt successfully.”
Exhibition Dates
November 4 – 18, 2023
Exhibition continues online
to December 15, 2023
This project began with an old, ring-bound sketchbook that I purchased in a thrift store in Chilliwack. Its pages were filled with faint pencil drawings of mountains, trees, streams and solitary cabins, as well as quaint montages of windmills, water pumps, birds on branches and arched stone bridges. Contemplating these sketches, I decided that these somewhat impoverished landscapes required life. With a disregard for plausibility, I started drawing animals into the scenes.
The artworks I’ve acquired range in quality and style and are dated from as far back as 1850 through to present day. Purchased for less than twenty-five dollars a piece, I consider the drawings to have been more or less discarded and my reworking of them to be an act of rehabilitation. Using the existing landscapes as a springboard, I introduce animals to the scene, out of context and out of scale. The resulting drawings act as fragments of fantastical narratives, of stories half told.
Read more about CARRIE WALKER here.
Selected works from other series are available. For images please call or email us at 604 730 9611 or info@cristallgallery.com
