Verdure

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Robert Wiens, White Pine, (detail) 1999, watercolour, Photo: Cheryl O,Brien

Saskatoon artist Ernest Lindner (1897-1988) and Robert Wiens of Picton, Ontario are a generation apart - maybe more. Both scrutinize trees and forest, and in so doing, stray from the well-worn paths of landscape conventions to recast the mechanics of painting. Lindner and Wiens both propose divergent reads on waldsterben, or ?forest death?. Robert Wiens? towering close-ups of pine trunks have an elegiac feel, whereas Lindner?s earlier representations of forest regeneration seem luminously optimistic. Lindner?s work recalls abstract painting by virtue of history. He was a key participant in the Emma Lake Artists Workshops. Wiens? slightly against-the-grain images are unapologetically painterly, sumptuous, as critic Gary Michael Dault observed, ? each trunk breaks down into abstraction ... or, if abstraction is where you?ve begun, nobly reassembles itself into a tree?. Verdure will include popular vernacular woodland icons, in addition to the paintings by Lindner and Wiens, to explore shifting generational relationships to the compressed histories and meanings of forest, painting and representation.