MARCH 11 – MAY 8, 2011
MICKY RENDERS: FINDING JOY
Micky Renders, Blue, Orange, Green, Red, Oils, 2011, images courtesy of the artist
Ottawa raised and Peterborough based Micky Renders studied art at a number of prestigious Ontario universities. The practicing artist also holds a degree in biology from the University of Guelph, Ontario and currently teaches visual arts and digital photography at Thomas A. Stewart Secondary School, in Peterborough.
Known for her exquisite, almost photographic, oil depictions of colour-rich ecological locations Renders’s new body of work, lyrically titled, FINDING JOY, extends the artist’s exploration of colour’s potential.
FINDING JOY comprises a suite of twenty-four colour field oil paintings in which the artist employs a set of photo/digital devices such as: the extreme close-up, the frame, photographic blur and photo/digital palette as formal troupes to achieve sensational chromatic affect. Photography is evident as an influence in Renders’s work, as an end in and of itself, and as a language, which allows her painting practice to move from representation into abstraction.
In FINDING JOY the artist evokes the photographic frame – a device that acts to structure the viewer’s field of vision, while adapting the photographic lens ability to blend, blur and court the threshold aspect of colour: colour strong enough to provoke in the viewer the double act of looking and seeing.
In order to achieve these outstanding results, the artist applies many layers of transparent paint mixed with liquid glaze to ever refine her tonal paintings, which then rely on a variation of contrasting hues (warm through cool) to activate a set of visual vibrations.
The artist writes:
Colour has the power to evoke psychological, physiological and symbolic effects: colour as light, colour as emotion, colour as temperature…energy…atmosphere…space. Colour embodies the fullness of existence.
Here, the frames become an extension of the work. More often then not, Renders’s coats them with another value of the same colour, allowing each work to resonate with its own subtle variations of tone and visual impact. Accordingly, each piece may be taken in as an individual field of pure chroma or may be seen as a linear procession of square singularly vibrating coloured panels.
Working wet into wet, the subtle transitions Renders achieves changes the focus of her artworks away from formal mark-making towards atmospheric colour – so that the essential perception of the work is one of space. Hence, her colourfields or spaces have the potential to be perceived as both very deep, and simultaneously as very shallow, because the glazed paintings enclosed in Renders's series, FINDING JOY function much like pools – pools that imply the possibility for reflection and deep space at once.
Carla Garnet/February 2011 Art Gallery of Peterborough, Ontario