 Hello everyone, and good evening. My name is Taryn Urquhart, and I'm the Arts and Special Events Programmer here at the West Vancouver Memorial Library. On behalf of the library and the West Vancouver Art Museum, I would like to welcome you to tonight's art talk. While I recognize that we are all in different places this evening, I would like to acknowledge that the West Vancouver Library and Art Museum reside within the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Squamish Nation, Slava-tooth Nation, and Musqueam Nation. We recognize and respect them as nations in this territory, as well as the historic connection to the lands and waters around us since time immemorial. I am personally grateful to call the Pacific Northwest my home, and I'm thankful to the Coast Salish communities that continue to protect the natural beauty and animal diversity that surround me every day. It has been my great pleasure to work with Hillary Letwin and her guests tonight to bring this event to your screens. And now I would like to pass things over to Hillary, who is waiting over at the museum. Hillary? Thank you, Taryn, and thank you to all of you for joining us this evening. We're delighted to be here at the Art Museum speaking about our current exhibition, which is called Order from Chaos, and features the work of two artists, B.C. Binning and Jane Adams. And I'm joined tonight by Jane Adams, who's going to tell us a little bit about her work and her life. And I'm delighted to be here with you, Jane, and it's been such a pleasure to work with you on this project. Thank you, it's come together beautifully, and it's always interesting to chart how our project comes together. And just for a bit of background for our audience, Jane and I have been working on this project for about two years. And it's been very exciting to be able to work with an artist who has a very important historic role in our community here in West Vancouver. And of course I'm speaking about Burt Binning, B.C. Binning. Burt and his wife, Jesse, built what is often called the first modern home in Western Canada here in West Vancouver in 1941. And this home, which still stands today, holds a very special place in our community. It's a national historic landmark. And this house served as an epicenter of arts and culture in West Vancouver for a number of decades. And Jane, it's been really wonderful to work with you to really examine the impact of Burt, not just on your life, but on the life of many artists and architects and designers. So we'll get to that. We'll talk a little bit about that. But before we do, I'd like to start by talking a little bit about your career. I wonder if you can tell us how you became a painter, how you became an artist. Yeah. Well, I was very young. I was 11. And my mother won a scholarship. I think in those days it was called the Royal Conservatory Scholarship. It was the precursor to the Canada Council. So she was awarded some money to go and live in France for a year and write an opera based on the return of the native, which she did. And the question was what to do with me. So I went to join her in London after the summer, after school was out. And we ended up living together in Paris for about six months and then later in the south of France. But it was in the months that we lived in Paris that I met a woman by the name of a sculptor, by the name of Frances Gage, who came from Toronto. And she was a marvelous teacher. And we ended up going together to the Louvre and all various art galleries and painting and sketching. And then I was put in school. So it sort of hindered that for a while. But that's where it began. And then later on, I had a great friend. He died just last year, Michael Morris. He won the Governor General's Award, I believe, some years ago for his painting. And we went off to London together to the Slade and he was a great friend and mentor. And we just about went everywhere. I was enrolled in another class at a school for design and he was working on a Canada Council. But we ended up going to some amazing events, including a David Hockney opening. I think it was David Hockney's first opening. I can't remember, but I think it was the Malboro Gallery. And he had this blonde hair and he had a gold suit on and it was his Men in the Shower series. And it was so exciting for us. And we had a wonderful time. So all of that sort of input got me into seriously painting. And later on, it was a Chelsea Art School that I went to. And then the Vancouver Art School, now Emily Carr. So that was the beginning. Yes, yes. And those early experiences traveling with your mother living abroad, those were very impactful and being exposed to the museums like the Louvre. And just to back up for those of our audience who aren't familiar, can you give us a quick introduction to your mother and tell us who she was? Yes, her name was Jean Colthard. And she died in 2000, but she was really a Canadian pioneer of contemporary music. And her music is played regularly. Tom Allen plays it quite a bit on the CBC. I'm always overjoyed to hear something. And recently, her prayer for Elizabeth was played at the CBC special on the funeral that day. So she's quite well known or very well known in music circles. But it was an interesting mother to have. We worked together on many projects. I actually did the designs for her cost of the costuming for the return of the native. And those paintings hang, I believe in the Canadian Music Center here. And we've worked together on some other projects for children through the Music Center. Yeah, so. So some wonderful collaborations. And your parents were both very involved in what we could call the sort of modern scene in Vancouver in the 50s. The early 60s. Yeah, so what do you tell us? Your father was also a part of that. Yeah, he imported Danish furniture to Vancouver. He had a store called Don Adams Interiors and anybody of a certain age would remember that store. And I think a lot of what he sold by some famous designers in Denmark at the time like Finjul and Arne Jacobsen and various people like that. They've been recycled, I think in Vancouver. So you can buy them on the second time around. But my father always said that they would be the antique of the future. And he was so true. It was so true. It was so right. How prescient. And I'd love to speak a little bit about their kind of extended circle. One of the things that we wanted to bring out in this project was the connections between you and Burt Binning, of course separated by a generation or two. And for those of us who aren't familiar with Burt States, he was born in 1909 and passed away in 1976 but was survived by his wife, Jessie, who lived to be 101. And she of course lived here in West Vancouver in their home. So maybe Jane, you can elaborate a little bit on the relationship that your parents had with the Binnings. Well, I think back in the 1940s and early 50s, Vancouver being so small, most artists, composers, poets, architects, they all knew each other. And Burt was very much Burt Binning and Molly Bobak and Jack Shadwold. They were all very close and quite friendly with each other. And I remember as a child Burt coming to the house in the exhibition at the museum, it's a picture, a line drawing that Burt did of my mother sitting at her piano. I have a memory of him coming. And we lived down Wiltshire Street in Carousel in those days. And my mother had a music room, which was quite beautiful. And he came in and I remember him drawing. I have a vague memory. There may be have been several drawings but I wouldn't know where they went. But the one that we kept is in the museum. But I didn't really know him. I was too young and then I went to Montreal for many years, 22 years I was there. And Jessie and mother remained friends after Burt's death. And in 1990, when I returned, Jessie and I became good friends through my mother. And I love going to her house. And a lot of my inspiration for my paintings started there in that scene. Her house was a small museum of his work. So I got to see just about everything that was coming in or going out at that in those years during that decade of the 90s. Yes. I think Jessie was really, it was very important to her. She really prioritized making sure that Burt's legacy lived on and she made sure that donations were made to a lot of local collections. And really sort of maintained the impact that he had because he taught a number of architects how to draw including Ron Tom and Arthur Erickson. And he was responsible for bringing Richard Neutra up from California to talk about the international style, the modern style of architecture. So certainly there was a huge impact that Burt had on the architectural scene and the artistic scene in Vancouver before his passing. And Jessie was committed to that legacy. So I love hearing stories about you going into their house and seeing his work and seeing his studio. And I think you lived in West Vancouver when you moved back from Montreal. We lived in one side of Sentinel Hill. So we were all quite close. Jessie would come over, swim in our little pool in the summer. And yeah, I saw his studio. His studio is probably still there up in the back garden but at that time she had some of his paintings in there as well, I guess, before they were given away to museums and so forth. So, but the mainstay in the house was the mural at the end of the hall, which had a big impact on me, which I have put to into the exhibition that really I loved. I love to, I borrowed actually his idea of little squares and what went on inside the squares in terms of home and comfort. And that was at the end of the hall in the house. And I think there was a very large one going down the hall, up on the wall. And I believe that same painting was in the hard-edge painting show recently at the gallery. It's a great big- At the Vancouver Gallery. Yeah, wonderful, blue background. And that was certainly in that show. Yeah, and it was in the house back then. Yes, yeah, yeah. So we've spoken a bit about Burt's influence on your work. It would, I think it would be nice to talk about some of the other influences that you've had in your artistic career because it's not just Burt. And I think one of the interesting things about this project and similar projects is that we're sort of acknowledging that artists don't operate in a vacuum. There are always influences and they don't even have to be direct influences. They can be interactive. And they can be networks of people sort of working together to make you the artist that you are. So I'd love to hear a little bit more. You mentioned Michael Morris. I'd love to hear a little bit more about some of the other artists that you cherish as influences in your artistic work. Well, way back when we left art school, we were all painting abstractly, and then I changed and was quite realism. I was into realism for many years. But in the beginning of my career, I loved an English painter, Victor Passmore. He was a big influence at the time. And of course, Mirol and Chagall as I think back and Kandinsky, we all kind of emulated and tried to in our way at that time, or certainly I did try to instill some of their ideas into my own work. And then in midlife, I guess, in my mid-career, I had a very influenced by Hockney after I'd seen that first exhibition in London and his paper pool series. I just adored that series of his in his career. And who else, let me look here. Oh my God, Joseph Raphael. He was a Northern California painter who was brilliant with watercolor. And at that time, I was doing a lot of watercolors and he did koi and ponds. And I can only think that our own Gordon Smith may have seen ponds done by Monet or so, who knows. And more recently, when I changed over to abstract painting in about 2015, 16, I found a book in the Vancouver in the art gallery about Sarah Crowner. And she's an extraordinary woman. I think she's about 50 now. And she does sales, wonderful, floating, flat colors that she stitches onto canvases. And I was intrigued by her work. And I think I probably have incorporated some ideas from her into my more recent work. And of course, well, Shadbold. We were good friends for many years. And even after school, I finished art school. I went back. After I'd moved to Montreal, I went back and I took my little baby girl with me and Doris took care of the child. And Jack and I would talk for a long time. He was a wonderful influence. So, and Roy Kayuka, in his classes, we used to sit on, well, he would sit on a stool and he would read poetry to us and we would paint his poetry. And that was, I remember one, I was an American poet and it went chickens, chickens in a wheelbarrow filled with rainwater. So we were all painting kind of rainy. Anyway, he evoked some wonderful ideas for his students and Ellsworth Kelly, I love his work and I still do. And I often look at his work. And one more, a Canadian, Millie Ritzvitt. And she came to the opening of the exhibition at your gallery and she's a wonderful Ontario painter. And we've been friends since art school. So a really full and rich and varied list of artists that you would count as influences. And I think you had previously remarked on how you don't, your influences, you sort of take your influences in, I would think of fairly typical way for artists. You're not copying anybody. It's not a direct reference to anybody's work but it's a very sort of gentle presence in your work and maybe you could collaborate on that. I think visual people see visually and then they orchestrate it their own way. Yeah, I think that's a beautiful way to express it. So I'd like to talk a little bit about the work that we feature in this exhibition and one can see an example of the work that we've included behind me. And of course, one of your more recent works behind you as well. So this sort of style of work you started doing in 2015, roughly. And you've told me previously that you came across the Douglas and McIntyre 2006 publication about B.C. Binning and his work and that that was an important moment for you. So do you wanna talk a little bit more about this current style in which you work and that you've been working in for about, well, just under 10 years, I guess. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about this current body of work. Well, my husband and I made a move to the city in 2016, we're in Kitsilano and it was quite a change, downsizing as they call it. So we moved, I had a large studio in West Vancouver where I taught and it was wonderful but I've taken a studio now on Granville Island. But the point is moving to the city, it was suddenly we were bombarded with sounds that I'd never heard before. The binners going up and down the lane at night and the rattle of bottles and the seagulls and the planes coming in over the harbor below and all of this and the roofers next door, they were doing a house. So everything began to kind of, it was like a company of this huge city life that blew in on me and I began painting that and that transformed, I think with the early years of the isolation and COVID and it became days passing. A lot of this series behind me and you are about days passing, not much to look forward to. Quiet calendar, there's some in your exhibition of hourglass dripping away and so a lot of it I think formulated out of what we were living during those two and a half years and we're coming out of it slowly and I'm thinking about what's next now. We'll see what appears but certainly the majority of the paintings in the exhibition are to do with those months of moving to the city and then the onslaught of the pandemic and so forth. Yes. And it was a really exciting prospect working with you to pick which of your works we were including in the exhibition and I'll just touch on our process for our viewers. We here at the Art Museum have 21 works of art that were donated by Jesse Binning's estate after she passed and those were all works by B.C. Binning and they ranged from paintings to prints to works on paper drawings, primarily pen and ink drawings. And so we had this selection of work by B.C. Binning that we wanted to include in this exhibition and in the end we've included 12 works by Binning and having that list of works we then went into Jeanne's studio and selected work that sort of on a compositional or formal level responded very strongly to the Binning work that we had access to and so you can see behind me a pairing of one of Jeanne's paintings with a mosaic that was designed by Binning actually from the now demolished CKWX radio station that was salvaged. The mosaic is made of Venetian glass tesserae and it's in a two-tone blue pattern, a geometric pattern and so throughout the exhibition we've hung Jeanne's work next to work by B.C. Binning and tried to highlight these really interesting relationships between the two artists and it's not hung in a chronological way. Jeanne, as you've indicated a lot of your work is recent work created from sort of 2019 forward. And so it's not hung chronologically but we're using the sort of the work of the two artists hung together to tell the story of both of you, both you and B.C. Binning and I think it works extremely well. It's a very bright and pleasing exhibition it's perfect for this time of year I think and the relationships are great. Jeanne, we're getting a lot of questions from visitors about your process. So I would love to have you tell us a little bit about some of the materials that you use and whether or not you work from a design or a drawing or if you just go right into the painting. So please tell us more about your artistic process for these works. I do go right into the painting actually I don't plan anything really. I have an idea for a form and I make a stencil usually or several stencils. And then I use acrylic paints, golden mostly and I do a background. I have a background already put on and dried and ready to go and then I use a stencil and trace over ideas of movement. And I think a lot of them like the one behind me had to do with after the move there was I have several canvases that have this kind of bridge work quality behind and the bridge work I think as I think back is the Lionsgate Bridge. It was going back and forth all the time and seeing friends and all that. But so I then I do these I fill in with color on top of the original background and then I use for pedograph pen where I carefully map out what the movement is doing. And some of it is painted over and some is painted around or between. And then because the repeated graph would move when I glaze it, I spray it and solidify it make it permanent. And then I glaze over with several layers of acrylic glaze that stabilizes it forever. It's that's about it. Yeah, it's there's a particularly nice passage in the exhibition that I really love where we have one of your works one of your two works on paper in the exhibition interior mural, which is inspired according to the title by the mural work at the Benning home. And we have that work hanging next to two works on paper by Benning, both of which show boats. One of them has a fishing boat with this incredible netting, which in my mind works so beautifully with the sort of grid lines that you have in your drawing. So we're looking at both of them together and you get these incredible graphic lines which I use Mosaic. I have used Mosaic, such as behind you, the Bert Benning on the left of you, on the right of you, left of us. I use Mosaic all my life right from the beginning. And I don't know how that happened, but in 1974, my mother had a commission through the Vancouver, through China actually. It came from China to do a orchestral piece based on the folk songs of Canada, the different provinces. And it was called Canada Mosaic. And it did not go to China. There'd been a situation, I don't know what happened, but it did go to Japan in 1974. Our conductor then, and I can't pull his name up, Akiyama. Anyway, it went, but all the years after that, I kept with the Mosaic. And in some of the hospitals here I have work and a lot of those that are in the hospital have the Mosaic patterns in them. This behind you, the Mosaic got a little bit stretched in other directions, but it's still there underneath. I was quite amazed to see you pick that one out to go with the, and it's still right. Thank you. It does work beautifully. Yeah, no, it's always gratifying when a plan that we've formulated in your studio, when we get into the actual space here at the Art Museum and very thankfully it works. So it's wonderful. So before we close, I would just like to speak very briefly about what does come next for you. Yeah. You've been working with this body of work now for almost a decade. And do you see yourself staying with this or do you see yourself going in the different directions? I will stay with the abstraction and I have a few ideas that keep popping in and out. I think probably next week I'll get back into the studio. It's harder in the summer to get into the studio, but I'll go and figure out something new. And you're quite disciplined about going to the studio, I think. I remember Gordon Smith saying that he needs to go in every day and work like a gardener. And I think that you're probably of that ilk as well. So I think the longer you leave not going to the studio, the ideas kind of evaporate. And then it's harder. The artist who has to face the blank canvas or the blank paper. When you're working, one thing leads immediately into another and you need to get to that space where your thoughts are always changing and collecting new ideas. One punctuation that you put, you'll see it appearing in the next painting because it worked in that one and you see it working in another way in a newer painting. So I think that's how the process develops. Yeah. It's wonderful to gain some insight into your process. Jane, it's been such a pleasure meeting with you this afternoon and speaking about your work. Thank you very much for meeting with us today. And we are delighted to have our visitors come in until the exhibition closes on September 23rd. We have produced a publication for this project as we do for most of our projects. And it's available here for purchase at the Art Museum for $20. And there is an essay by me, mostly about Bert Binning's life and an essay by Jane about her life and work. And we would encourage you to come in and see the exhibition. So thank you, Jane, and thank you to our viewers for joining us. Thank you.