‘Again I hear these waters…

Exhibition June 11 to 26

Reception June 17 - 1 to 4 pm

The images which have been turned into these paintings gave me the opportunity to compose with colour, form, line, pattern, and texture - and to create landscapes of particular times and places, which will, I hope, afford the person viewing these pieces an opportunity to reconnect with their own similar experiences of the natural world.

Harold Town, writing about the landscape paintings of J.E.H. MacDonald commented that the work “gave a sense of the dynamic link between man and nature.” There is, in that link, the possibility of delight, pleasure and restoration.  I paint landscapes because I must, and because I love being outside, in nature -it gives and has given me joy, and joy should be shared.

Far better than I can express, the best, and most thoughtful analysis of the complex relationship between the experience of nature and the remembrance of that experience was written by William Wordsworth:

“For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.”

Excerpted from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798

Originally from Toronto, Murray McDonnell attended the University of Toronto (BA 1977, B.Ed 1978).  After which, he moved to Saskatchewan to teach High School art and music, where he also works as a wilderness guide-instructor and plays with a jazz/contemporary music ensemble.

“These paintings derive from the way a life is lived, from the satisfaction of certain needs.”

McDonnell notes these needs as: the need to move, the need to be outside, the need to explore, the need to use our senses and the need to create. The artist’s strongest visual experiences come from three sources: “vistas of the natural world, the contemplation of still, perfect movements; and being in the presence of great art.”

For him, it is “not the image, nor the subject that is important, rather it is the need to make and share something with others in order to reflect that initial powerful internal visual experience. McDonnell determinedly lives close to nature, often in remote locations, in order to inform his art practice with distinctive visual experiences.  By this means the artist’s choice of subject is directed / imposed.

McDonnell’s work is represented in private and public collections across Western Canada, Ontario, the United States and England.

“I didn’t and I don’t choose the work. It chose and it chooses me.”