Dave Gorman art show at Th’YARC gallery for April

Cigarette ashes are blended with oil to shade the corner of one work in his show ‘From sea level to 5500 feet, with spoons and forks in between’ which can be caught at Th’YARC during the month of April.

This is Gorman’s first show and no doubt his former New York trained art teachers Gertrude and Paula Garson would be proud of their Yarmouth student.

Gorman also studied art, and coastal geography at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick.

At the age of 12 he began painting and spent one year in the Art in Action program.

His April show is comprised of 14 works painted between 2004 and 2008. Most focus on semi-abstract coastal and mainland interpretations.

His main influence is the natural environment and it’s ever changing demeanor.

There’s ‘Home’ which he painted from Cranberry Head. It glows golden and orange like a fiery sunset. He refers to an abstract rendition of wintertime in the Rocky Mountains as being both bleak and dramatic.

“There’s a lot of disjointed lines but also symmetry which is really interesting in the mountains,” he said.

‘Stormy Sea’ implies the swell of the ocean and the cracking of the waves.

“When you go out towards John’s Cove on a stormy day and you look to your right it’s very choppy but at the same time it sort of fits into a pattern,” he said.

Gorman says he never works from photographs. He begins by picking a canvas size then chooses a colour.

“From the first colour I use, I pick a complementary colour and then it goes from there. I don’t think I’ve ever sat down and said I’m going to paint ‘this’,” he said.

His rendition of the CBC radio towers outside Sackville includes lots of birds; something he says is actually absent at that location.

A view from an airplane over Manitoba leaves ponds by a dusty dirt road, barns, and fields to the imagination. Flight paths and roads continue off the canvas.

For ‘Emerald Basin’ he mixed sand with the oil to provide texture.

“It was painted entirely with a knife. You’ll notice on some of my paintings, sort of the heaviness of the paint itself becomes part of the painting. It becomes two-dimensional. I like heavy mediums and a lot of texture,” he said.

‘Sailing into sunset’ has ten times the paint that some artists would use. Blue and red are strong in this painting.

“I really like working with blue and red because they are contrasting colours and they can be unappealing to the eye in a way but at the same time they are almost soothing,” said Gorman.

Here he has scratched and pulled down different layers using varying pressure with a knife.

He used a deep canvas mounted in the corner for the painting of a staircase. Only one colour – red - is used, which is mixed with cigarette ashes to shade an upper corner.

Th’YARC gallery is open from Tuesday – Friday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.