The waking of a goddess brought spring to the ancient world. A painting of this nude goddess, Persephone, is one of the highlights of the Dundas Valley School of Art auction, a sure sign of spring around here.
This year’s event, the 43rd, consists, as always, of a live auction and a silent one. More than a thousand gorgeous paintings, sculptures, ceramics, photographs, jewellery and textiles by established and emerging artists are up for grabs.
The live auction begins at 8 p.m. next Saturday. More than 50 works await in the big room upstairs, the scene of sometimes frantic bidding later in the evening.
Walter Hickling’s Persephone, a large acrylic, captures the goddess’s rebirth. Hickling, a Burlington artist and teacher who died two years ago, liked to vary his repertoire. In Persephone, he tackles a classical myth in a thoroughly modern style by breaking the landscape up into large dynamic rectangles.
The human figure is equally dynamic. Persephone was already a famous goddess more than 3,000 years ago in the Greek world. She spent part of her year underground and part of it above ground. Her comings and goings between these two worlds explained why seasons changed, how plants grew, and the close relationship between death and rebirth.
Every spring Persephone ascended from her burial place deep in the earth. Hickling depicts her rising through the earth to the surface, where snow still covers the greenish shoots reaching toward the sky.
She pushes one hand out of the ground and kicks. Her dishevelled yellow hair contributes additional movement and also hints at the sun the new season will bring.
Another female, a Christian saint descended from an ancient bear goddess, takes centre stage in a small panel painted by an unknown artist more than a hundred years ago.
We see St. Ursula, her eyes gazing piously upward, mouth open. She’s identifiable by her attribute: an arrow, symbol of her martyrdom, at her neck.
The live auction also includes a drawing of a woman reading attributed to Berthe Morisot, a leading French Impressionist painter.
The land, not human figures, attracts Gisele Comtois. In Killarney Reflection, the Burlington artist places us in a rocky foreground dotted with bits of vegetation. This bareness hardly prepares us for the vibrant, colourful view that lies in the distance.
Langley Donges, a Toronto artist who died in 1992, keeps us firmly in the foreground in his untitled landscape, with a row of trees partly blocking our view. The trees lean leftward and rightward, creating a strong sense of movement that threatens to pull the composition apart. He also enlivens his oil with generous dabs of green and blue paint textured with the marks of the brush.
A more urban view appears in Christine Proctor’s Neighbourhood I, a wonderfully simplified streetscape. A variety of stylized buildings, some with red roofs, stand against a yellow sky.
Monika Dabrowska also loves yellow. She’s used it as a backdrop for a pair of tall vases with red tulips in her bold untitled encaustic painting.
Other great offerings in the live auction include Scott Barnim, Sandee Ewasiuk, Catherine Gibbon, Sally Glanville, Sandra Henry, Jody Joseph, Peter Kirkland, Stephen Landers, Marianne Reim, E. Robert Ross, Mara Schiavetto and Julia Veenstra, among others.
There are many great works in the silent auction, too. It fills several rooms of the DVSA and lasts three days, climaxing on Saturday night after the live auction.
