Saskatoon-based artist Nancy Lowry creates paintings that explore the intersection of abstraction and landscape. Her exhibition, Colour in Place, pays homage to her time at the Emma Lake Artist Workshops and several of the artists she encountered there or who also shared a connection to the workshops.
Included in the exhibition are works by artists Reta Cowley, Mina Forysth, Dorothy Knowles, Margaret Vanderhaeghe, Tammi Campbell, Landon Mackenzie, Elizabeth McIntosh, Leah Rosenberg, Monica Tap, and Sylvia Ziemann.
We recently spoke with Nancy about her work, her new collaboration with a fellow local artist and memories of her early days in art.
Remai Modern: What was your relationship to art like in your early life?
Nancy Lowry: I was very fortunate to grow up with a lot of exposure to the arts through my family and the education that I received. Growing up in Saskatchewan provided me with an innate connection to the lands. And I’ve always responded to it by going out in nature and trying to capture a sense of something. My art travels took me to New York where I was able to switch gears in my practice and begin to work on more abstract elements.
What is it about the landscape you’re drawn to?
When I was five, my family moved from Toronto to Saskatoon and the way that we got here was driving across the country. Just in the childhood age, I was kind of strapped to the window and staring out and watching the land. I kind of created a movie in my head and I can still sort of see little pictures that emerged from that time.
I think it felt like kind of a relief to be out of Toronto, out of an urban centre and into a great wide open of the prairies. And as our license plate says, Land of the Living Skies. I love the activation that we can find in the skies and the way they cast light on everything. I’m just fascinated by looking closer at things and trying to find little patterns and colours and different systems.
Every day and every kind of moment is so different, so there’s endless possibility to create different things through that.
When did you first pick up a brush and start painting?
I think that my parents just got us all creating. There were five kids in my family and I think it was just something, a way of occupying our time. My dad was very into education and reading so he exposed me to a lot of things, and my mom was kind of a nurturing, creative soul who put her beautiful touch in everything. As kids, we just were able to kind of free-for-all play within those areas. So it was very free and I don’t remember ever deciding to be an artist particularly, I think I just innately was given permission to and didn’t turn it off.
Emma Lake and the artist workshops held there played an important role in your art and life. What was your first experience there like?
I guess my first experience getting close to Emma Lake was through taking a teen class in figure drawing with Degen Lindner. From her I found out about a teen class that they were offering up at the site up at the Kenderdine campus and I went there first when I was 14 with a group of youth and that was just incredibly creatively liberating.
I think just staying in those cabins and being able to get up, you had routine of mealtime and things were provided for you, but you didn’t have the tangles of normal domestic life so you were able to be really free in what you were doing artistically. And so it was a really special place. I think as teenagers we’re not usually granted that type of freedom to explore. So it was probably a little bit hellish for the counsellors, but they survived and nobody got hurt.
How did it feel to be up there?
Just the boreal forest, I feel at peace there and it was a way to just get out into sit in the woods. I always heard stories about John Cage getting lost there. I remember going out on missions and really accepting that whatever happened, happened. And I kind of take that into my practice too, of trying to just be trusting, which it is hard to do sometimes, especially the older we get.
It’s kind of a longstanding connection. After having gone the first time to the team camp, I kept going back every year because I knew that I was going to get a week or two of away time and get to delve into those things. So it was a really free place for me to be.
How did you develop your painting style?
My mom gave me last night a painting that I did, and it’s a portrait of the caretaker that was at Emma Lake when I first went to the team camp. And somehow Degen [Lindner, the instructor] convinced him to model for us. He was the most reluctant, grumpy model that you could see. But he had just a gorgeous face and it was so nice to paint him. He was just so real. And I liked the kind of honesty of his demeanour. That portrait I worked intensely hard on and I was able to get a bit of a likeness, so it kind of felt like an achievement. But for some reason that didn’t ever become my goal. I wanted to push things further somehow. There’s just so many different ways we can do art, and that’s what was great about going to NSCAD [Nova Scotia College of Art & Design]. It was a college that really accentuated conceptual art and performance art, and it was kind of almost a faux pas to be doing painting.
Tell us a bit about your recent collaboration with fellow artist Clint Neufeld.
I have worked with collaborations in the past in a kind of very playful way. This is the most serious that I’ve taken it and pushed it in further directions. And it started with a cane that my good friend pulled out of the river and gave to me when I was struggling with walking.
When I was in the hospital, I was pretending to make larger work with it and using it as a sketching tool. As this project at Remai Modern was coming to fruition, the Denyse Thomasos show was up so I was getting to see these huge paintings here in Saskatoon, which was incredible. In some of the video stills of her working, she’s using an extension. I had seen that in the past with other artists and it just kind of gave me permission to push it and try that. So I collaborated with Clint Neufeld and he did a 3-D scan of the cane.
We decided that it would be better to have a variety of brushes to do kind of a performative piece on site at Emma Lake. And so then it created another collaborative project, which was stick collecting. I think different sticks speak to different people. So that was a playful aspect of it. What he did was he printed the handle and would attach it to the stick and then attach a paintbrush to the other end.
I like having different shaped sticks, they turn differently and they move differently and it changes the gesture of movement.
It’s kind of ironic, it being a cane shape, but then putting a brush on the bottom. You don’t want to bear weight on it. So it’s kind of counterintuitive. And that’s part of the fun of process of work. You discover things. It’s actually a different mode of paint application than I imagined.
I have a memory. When I was in 1998, I did a program and this is probably what locked down my interest in landscape more than anything else. The Mendel ran a group called Landscape 98.
At that point I was using acrylics. I had never even tried oils and Lorenzo [Dupuis, artist] offered to let me try his oils. When he set it up for me to use, he kept his box of paint on the ground and I couldn’t reach the ground, but I was too ashamed to tell him that I couldn’t reach the ground. So I had a stick that I was dipping into the paint colours to get paint up to put it on my brush.
I was so determined though, it pulled up this determination in me to get something down and get painting. And that painting actually holds, well now it holds the story too, but it surprised me in that it worked because I felt intensely constrained. So it opened up this territory of where I would be more comfortable with the restraints that would be in place.
Your exhibition at Remai Modern features work by other artists with deep connections to Emma Lake, including Dorothy Knowles. What do you remember about her?
There was a day that we were all out at Beaver Creek painting and she came out and everyone was facing the river and trying to paint the kind of vista of the river. And she just plainly said to turn around if you find something in the landscape that you think is beautiful or cliche, she didn’t say the word cliche, but I think she meant that kind of notion. Turn around and look at what’s behind you and try to capture that because often the things that you’ll learn from are not what you’re focusing on.
I think that in order to keep play as an active component of her work, she would set up challenges for herself in the studio and just little tricks and challenges, tests for herself to do. I definitely learned from that. And it’s a kind of go-to if I’m ever in that kind of stuck mood.
About Nancy Lowry
Nancy Lowry (b. 1978, Toronto) has been based in Saskatoon for much of her life. After completing her BFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2003, she returned to Saskatoon and began working in the late artist Mina Forsyth’s studio. Lowry attended the Triangle Arts Association, New York, 2005; the Pouch Cove Residency, Cornerbrook, NL, 2003; the Wells Artists Project with Robert Murray and Michael Morris, Wells, BC, 2006; and the Tao Hua Tan International Artist Retreat and Residency (Anhui Province, China, 2019).
Gathering inspiration from poets and authors, she regularly attended the Artists and Writers Colonies at St Peter’s in Muenster in central Saskatchewan. Lowry attended the Emma Lake Artist’s Workshops (2001- 2003) and later coordinated the workshops (2007-2012). She is the recipient of numerous SK Arts and Canada Council grants.
Colour in Place is on view until April 6, 2024.