JANE EVERETT | In Conversation
In the middle of a number of significant artistic accomplishments, we share a conversation with Jane Everett about the Shuswap in British Columbia, the artist's cultivated process, and her newest Onyx Creek works. Exploring the riparian environments where water meets land, Everett increasingly blurs the line between reality and the abstract in ways that offer refreshing and engaging visions of life and the worlds around us.
Can you tell us about the setting of Onyx Creek?
Everett: We have a cabin on the north shore of the Shuswap (a body of lakes at the top of the Okanagan valley), and Onyx Creek is about a two and a half kilometre paddle along the shoreline from where we are.
In the Spring, when the melt comes, the lake rises somewhere between 8 – 12 feet. This water feeds into the Columbia river system, which feeds everything to California... It's a huge amount of water that comes up. On the shore where the mouth of Onyx Creek joins into the lake, there are all these willows and they are flooded. So you're paddling amongst the greenery and the light is not just coming from overhead – it's coming up from the water. You get this incredible effect.
That sounds like a perfect environment for your work...
Everett: I'm mainly a painter of light, and this is a place where it's very intense – your experience of light.
Everybody knows that feeling of going to the lake or the ocean, and the sunlight's on the water, and you get that feeling of euphoria. I don't know why we get that... I think it must be some atavistic reaction we have to light on water – that it's good for us.
Do your compositions change a lot from field to studio?
Everett: I usually start with a photograph on my cell phone – lousy photographs have always worked better for me than good ones... If I start that way, I have this connection of where to go and I'm establishing the composition in that process.
You can do a bad painting with a good composition, but you can't do a good painting with a bad composition. It's the basic decisions you have to start making at the beginning.
Your paintings bring us to very real spaces, yet reality and abstraction are hard to distinguish...
Everett: I always want to paint more the experience than the actual landscape. It's not photography, it's not high realism... It's trying to hang onto how I felt at that very transient moment.
