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Red Deer’s Paul Boultbee takes the ‘busy-ness’ out of art using unconventional tools

Urban Pastorals show pares nature down to its essentials
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One of Paul Boultbee’s abstracts inspired by the Gaetz Lakes Sanctuary. (Photo by LANA MICHELIN/Advocate staff).

There’s nothing too precious about art-making, as far as Paul Boultbee is concerned.

When the need has arisen, the Red Deer visual artist has stood up on a ladder and swirled paint onto a large canvas with a kitchen mop.

He’s also created some of his abstract minimalist compositions with a dry-wall trowel.

For his latest exhibition, Urban Pastorals, at the white gallery in Sunworks on Ross Street, he employed one of those credit card-like hotel room keys.

Boultbee recalled needing to spread paint with something smaller than a pallet knife. Since he happened to have a forgotten hotel key-card in his pocket, he tried it as a paint scraper, and the results are as colourfully layered as peeling buildings in states of urban decay.

The look of these textural “Matrix” paintings inspired Boultbee to mount his latest exhibition. It mixes paintings inspired by urban grittiness with those that pare nature down to its essential forms.

The nature abstracts are all taken from a photo of the forests and lakes around the Kerry Wood Nature Centre in the Gaetz Lakes Sanctuary. Boultbee explained he didn’t want to capture the busy-ness of grass and foliage, but focused on the forms of sky, forest and lake.

Despite their sparseness, it’s amazing what these paintings depict for some viewers, said the artist.

One person told him that Kerry Wood Sanctuary No. 2 looked like an aerial view of farm fields intersected by a blue river — “and I haven’t been able to see anything else since,” admitted Boultbee, with a chuckle.

The Ontario native moved to Red Deer in 1982 to become a Red Deer College librarian. After retiring from his full-time job in 2000, he took the two-year visual arts program at RDC and is now completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C. through distance learning.

Boultbee has exhibited his art all over Canada as well as Connecticut and Oregon, and has always been drawn to minimalism. Even when he paints representational shapes, such as grain elevators, he said, “all I’m interested in is the shape of the elevator in context of the landscape, not the shingles and doors.”

Through his pared-down process, he hopes viewers can appreciate “the colours and relationships” on the canvases he creates.

Urban Pastorals is on until March 31.



lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com

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Boultbee’s hotel key-card scraped painting, Matrix. (Photo by LANA MICHELIN/Advocate staff).