Robert Amos, canada.com Published: Thursday, February 09, 2006 VISUAL ARTS What: Points of View; paintings, relief and sculpture Who: Sherrard Grauer Where: The Moore Gallery, 1014 Broad St., Victoria When: until Feb. 22 For more info: 388-7030, www.themooregallery.com or www.sherrardgrauer.com

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Where to begin talking about Sherry Grauer?

Grauer herself sometimes starts at the abstract end of things, with washes of colour on canvas, or the rough rubbing of charcoal on paper.

She seems to identify herself as a force of nature.

The forms that result are organic.

As she works, the colours, ideas and images bubble up from her memories and experiences.

Light seems to dance through the leaves, waves wash pebbles into patterns and the seasons are imprinted in the rings of a tree's growth.

Flickering shadows, tide line, wood grain -- the force that drives the flower drives her.

"If you draw a line," says Grauer, whose work is now on display at the Moore Gallery on Broad Street, "and then you try to copy it, it comes out different." The marks she makes are driven by the repetition and change of nature.

Mind you, Grauer is not afraid to make her vision articulate.

She is willing to paint birds flying past streetlights, and housetops and freighters at anchor.

With a pencil or pastel, she illuminates the sharp, green moss, rimlit along the edge of a vine maple stalk.

Her pictures are always of something. But like Emily Carr, she tries never to lose sight of the underlying movement and the Big Picture.

There's more. Lots more. "I love detail," she insists, "but sometime you have to get up and use your muscles and think in terms of volume for a while."

Grauer brings to the Moore Gallery her long reputation as an artist in this province.

After studies at the Ecole du Louvre and the Atelier Ziegler in Paris, and later at the San Francisco Art Institute, she had her first exhibition at Vancouver's Bau-Xi Gallery in 1965.

Her most recent Bau-Xi exhibition was in 2003.

But that's Vancouver. Two years ago, she moved with her husband to a property outside Duncan along the Cowichan River, and has found a sympathetic home in Victoria at the Moore Gallery.

The current show fills that tiny venue, with work representing her many concerns, some dating back as far as 1984.

There has been a certain continuity in her career, but this show presents an evolution of ideas.

Her website, www.sherrardgrauer.com, has separate sections on her work as a painter, sculptor and creator of "reliefs" -- her name for the wall-mounted objects that live somewhere between painting and sculpture.

Her canvases surge and free themselves from flatness.

She may shrink bits of them with hot water, staple the resulting folds and press the ridges into place.

She rumples and wrinkles them until they look like streaming clouds and folded mountains.

Coruscating tree bark made from paper pulp stands forth, the medium and its message simply, surprisingly, fusing as one.

"Things that the materials can do are things that I couldn't think of myself -- and I can take the hint," she laughs.

These ruckled-and-rouched surfaces respond to her paintbrush eloquently, neatly passing from the "painted to look like" all the way to "takes the paint as forms take light."

Many artists would be satisfied with this revelation, but Grauer doesn't reduce things to a formula.

Her creative dance of memory, senses and free play leads her on and on.

Rhythmic passages of pastel and charcoal, ground into the canvas, somehow emerge as a sensation of pine needles, as boughs swaying in the breeze, and as shafts of light passing through to the forest floor.

She has attached ribbons of canvas loosely across the painted surface, echoing the underlying forms.

These ribbons, saturated with iridescent and interference colours, shimmer and sparkle with reflections of actual light.

Her play with the elements goes on. A huge salmon made of stainless-steel wire mesh is part of the show, as is a highly detailed painting of the weeds in Grauer's garden.

I can't get around to it all in this column, but I can recommend a visit to the show.

© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2006