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Ladysmith Gallery: Artist celebrates natural world with rare large scale watercolours

Nan Goodship’s exhibit Noticing the Unnoticed opens at Ladysmith Waterfront Gallery.
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Nan Goodship has a moment near the completion of every painting where she puts downs the brush, directs her attention towards areas that are left intentionally blank and ponders whether the piece is truly finished.

“I’ve been playing with how to use white space within them as a compositional element,” she said. “For me, it’s the equivalent of solitude or contemplation and it brings clarity to the paintings.”

The Duncan artist, whose known for her ceramics, is showing 23 large scale watercolour paintings this week at the Ladysmith Waterfront Gallery in a show called ‘Noticing the Unnoticed’ - a reference to our surroundings which Goodship wants us to pause and bring more awareness to.

Anyone who has visited downtown Duncan would have seen the 350 sq-ft public mural on the bandstand next to city hall that Goodship created with Maynard Johnny Jr. a few years ago.

Around the same time she also started working towards a Master’s in Fine Art from a college in the United States.

The program was the basis for the body of work being presented at the Ladysmith gallery, although Goodship has been painting for about as long as she’s being working with clay but never showing it publicly.

“It feels really great to be shifting and presenting this body of work finally because it’s been some time in the making,” she said.

“Everything I do tends to be inspired by the natural world. We live in such an incredible place.”

When she was 18 years old, Goodship was on an exchange in Japan where she learned about Ikebana - the art of flower arranging.

The time abroad still serves as an inspiration and acts as a the lens through which she sees her surroundings.

“When I’m looking at the natural world I find myself drawing out the design from some of the principles I learned in Ikebana,” she said.

Watercolour paintings are typically limited due to the fact that there’s a certain size canvas used and they are also framed behind glass.

“There’s a certain kind of magic with watercolours that I just find really appealing,” Goodship said.

She has overcome both the challenges to making larger scale paintings after finding big rolls of 140 lb. Arches paper and then adhering it to a cradleboard for support.

Each one is then finished with five coats of a UV protectant varnish.

“I’m just kind of attracted to doing things larger scale,” she said.

“The paintings have a real presence. When you put them on the wall they’re almost like a person in the room. They really stand for something and they fill a space differently than the smaller paintings.”

She sees producing work of this scale as a new challenge that just gets “exponentially more interesting as they get larger and more complex to solve.”

“You can say more and do more with it as it gets larger.”

Many of her paintings are inspired from photographs she’s taken while out for walks.

Goodship never maps out in advance where she’ll incorporate the white space, which she views as positive rather than negative, or even unfinished.

“It’s been kind of experimental so all of them are pushing an edge for me but it’s a process that’s been very exploratory and fun,” she said.

Her hope is that the exhibit will “encourage awareness of the spacious, teaming environment around us and to encourage acts of attention as a loving gesture towards that which supports us so well.”

As part of the exhibit, Goodship will be in the gallery all this week painting a large watercolour.

“I’m wanting people to understand the process and to get involved in it,” she said.





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