THE BATTLEFORDS — In Grade 7 or 8, while fascinated by the famous fantasy novel, Lord of the Rings, Saskatchewan artist Gordan Bland decided to try drawing a picture of Gandalf confronting Balrog at the Moria Bridge.
“...[it’s] the first thing I can remember, specifically painting … It was an awful painting, really hideous as far as I can remember it,” Bland told the News-Optimist/SASKTODAY.ca, laughing.
But the Prince Albert artist and teacher of over 30 years never really had that much to do with art beyond his early foray into drawing wizards. That is until 1985, when Bland bought his first computer, a Macintosh roughly the size of a toaster.
“That really got me back into doing visual art,” Bland said, describing his experimentation with the then state-of-the-art MacPaint and its countless limitations with 576-by-720 pixels and black and white graphics.
But now Bland wanted to see what he could do, and he sought out courses summer art courses at the University of Saskatchewan and Kenderdine Campus at Emma Lake, where he was taught by artists such as Degan Linder, Donna Kriekle, Myles MacDonald and Kevin Quinlan.
“...some very good artists in their own right."
And Bland describes himself as a 'jack of all media,' using his talents mostly for landscape-style artworks featuring sometimes man-made, other times actual scenery, but all with natural elements. That was until he and his wife moved to North Battleford in the 2010s and decided to purchase a new car.
“I started sketching shiny cars in the showroom and didn't find them all that exciting,” Bland said.
“...but I started a little exercise of just drawing geometric shapes and had no direction to it. I was just putting down a rectangle, then another rectangle, playing around with the balance of the various shapes,” Bland noted.
Religion, Mythology and Society
“Ultimately, I drew up a little picture that had a number of circles and a big long rectangle with a triangle on top. That one kinda bothered me, and I thought, ‘why, what does it mean, what is it trying to tell me?”
The figure Bland describes shows up in almost every painting in this series of geometric paintings that he’s coupled with a long-standing passion for mythology and religion.
“...I’ve always been interested in mythology, various cultures, and basically the stories that people have told over time. So those all came together,” Bland said on the theme of his newest body of work, Allegories - Meditations on Religion and Society, which runs at the Chapel Gallery until June 25.
"I think I inherited this from my father, a questioning of religious beliefs and feeling like a lot of what we are presented with in organized religion is, in some way or other, a little bit superficial, and the things that really matter are a lot deeper than what many people would consider."
And the word OHM plays a large part in the first piece of the series, which starts viewers down a road of meditation.
“Keeping the description of OHM in mind, there are three letters embedded in the picture," Bland said, which is, of course, the mantra of some eastern religions, the sound of self-awareness.
Nothing and Everything
It doesn't bother Bland that no one can seem to agree on what his body of work is trying to say.
“I think that's tremendous. I think it’s really, really, really fascinating that we don’t all think alike, and we don't all, when presented with something that is trying to say something, that we don't all interpret it the same way," Bland said.
"That's a fascinating aspect of human nature."
And whether the guests at the exhibition notice it consciously or unconsciously, they seem to recognize that it's saying something. While one guest might say that painting 11 scares them and fills them with dread, another might say that they feel elevated. Some seem to find clarity in the exhibition, while others find fear.
"By the time I got to the second last painting there, I gotta say I, was in kinda a dark mood. I was feeling like this was a real downer," Bland said, noting that he felt it necessary to find a way to lift up the viewer's experience. Something that in the requests for comments at the end of the show, a viewer noted that it feels like a cop-out, while others enjoyed a breath of levity.
"...the viewers enter into some of the thinking ... and people see something there, [they] just disagree.
And after you've wandered the gallery, and pondered religion and society, wondering what it all means, you're greeted with a painting of a sweeping landscape, trees rustling, still waters, and mountain tops. This picture and an image of fruit in a bowl.
