Consider your artwork a 'space machine'
and measure up first, Island artists advises

by Michael Sasges

After a year of visiting new homes, I know a couple of things that I once did not: Townhouses typically have more stairs than a detached single-family home or apartment, usually two flights, and they typically have more partywalls than high-rise apartments, usually tow.

Developers and builders invest much time and treasure in the treatment of these townhouse realities, less to mitigate and more to make memorable for prospective buyers.

The developer of the Coho townhouses in Pitt Meadows, for example, installed a spotlight-illuminated wall niche at the top of the first flight of stairs connecting the main entrance and main living floor. It’s an opportunity for household members to create, from their treasures, a welcome-home and welcome-visitor moment.

Polygon Homes is a local leader in using the works of local visual artists to make its homes, and partywalls and stairwells, memorable.

That’s how I came to ask artist Sherrard Grauer how she might impose her personality, her portfolio her means, on a new townhouse and, further, not how, but does the owner of a townhouse with the Uplands prospects defer or attempt to dominate location.

Grauer has been exhibiting in Canada since 1964. Her canvasses and sculptures are in private and public collections across the country, including the Canada Council Art Bank; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Musee d’Art Contemporain, Montreal; and the Vancouver and Surrey art galleries.

She has been executing commissions across the country since the late ‘60s. The long-time Vancouver resident is well-traveled, accordingly (and since her student days).

A member of the Royal Canadian Academy, she now lives on a Vancouver Island farm, where her big bright studio was created out of a very old barn with the help of her son, Max Keith-King.

She hasn’t toured Uplands, but has read the project’s sales literature and my interviews with seller Ralph Archibald and buyer Stacy Elliott and reviewed the floorplans.

Her first point is about artwork and its role in establishing or defining who we are or who we might think we are: Architectural considerations should not drive artwork decisions.

“Look for your art far and wide and buy what pleases and especially interests your own eye and mind. That way it can’t miss being in your own style and fitting in no matter where you alight.”

“I have moved often, to many disparate houses, and it’s a pleasure finding new places for old favourite paintings; amazing how there always is a right place, and they make the news space your own.”

Her second point is about artwork in homes with views – “eye-stretching views” – and with the expanses of walls, like the Uplands townhouses. “Happily these designs also provide wall space enough for large canvasses that can stretch the eyes wherever you put them.”

Paintings, large and small, usually expand space, she says. “If you have one that fills a whole wall, that wall disappears, and the engaged mind moves through it.”

“Bear in mind, this [opportunity] does not depend on the presence of a horizon in the painting. Figurative, colour-field, hard-edge, political, whatever… if it engages you, it’s your space-machine, as books are your time-machine.”

Small canvasses that expand space are not absolutely small, but relatively small. “It’s all in the proportion of canvas to wall; a small canvas enlarges a small wall.”

For example, Remembered Beach (2004, mixed media on canvas, 12 x 16 inches) on the small powder-room wall at the top of the first flight of stairs in the Avalon and Blaine models would be “a bright glimpse as you pass by – maybe a two-second pause.”

“Staircases, where you can’t back up, are the perfect place for small treasures – beloved watercolors or miniatures that invite inspection as you dawdle, up or down… then, on the landing, which can be seen from up or down or both, boom! Crosscurrents – Under a Distant Sun – a view to a very far horizon.”

(Crosscurrents is a charcoal and acrylic on canvas Grauer completed three-years ago, with not-meant-to-be missed dimensions of 69.25 inches by 54.5 inches.)

Grouped smaller paintings, to achieve a parallel impact, require “lots of work and planning and thought before making holes in the wall. Grouping is an undertaking “perfect for people who enjoy puzzles.”

Her Vine Maple drawings could flank a fireplace separated by Dry Season over the mantel. The former (2003, mixed media on paper 22 x 30 inches) are verticals; the latter a horizontal (2003, mixed media on paper 30 x 22).

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