Low Down Articles
Artist Profiles - Sandy Castledine
Article 3 of 73
From the book Artists of the Gatineau Hill by Catherine Joyce. This article first appeared in the "Artist Profiles" column in the August 30, 2006 issue of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
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Conversations with Colour
Creating art is a long conversation. For Sandy Castledine, the experimental artist at Lac Notre-Dame, the dialogue springs from a love of colour. There is something about the movement, depth, and mystery of colour that keeps her dreaming and experimenting, pushing her boundaries to encompass the light-filled imagery that comes to her day and night.
"Most of my work is thinking. When I'm driving long distances or lying in bed falling asleep, or even looking at ads in magazines, the images come and I wonder what I will do with them, how I will go about it. Once I finish a painting, I want more. I want to try something else, something new. I want to keep learning and growing. The process compels me."
The continuing exploration of her materials - silk and ink, parchment, canvas and paper, watercolour and acrylics - mirrors the evolution of Sandy's life as an artist. Now a determined risk-taker, she initially followed a more traditional path. Growing up in Ottawa in the '50s, she studied art at Glebe Collegiate, then later at McGill before she married. It wasn't until her children were grown that she returned to painting in the '70s, taking classes in oils and then in watercolours.
"I was working as a manager of an art gallery, taking lessons from the owner, but I wanted something looser, something I couldn't define. Then I took a workshop with my cousin in Brockville. She said, 'Come on, we'll play.' I suddenly realized what I had been missing all this time,"
Together they went for two seasons to Bridgewater, the art school outside Tweed, Ontario, where the doors of perception flew open for Sandy. "Art is a series of revelations as you work. You come to realize that it is only paper, canvas, paint. There are no mistakes. If the piece doesn't work, you paint it over, you begin again."
Sandy quickly moved beyond traditional materials to experiment in mixed media, in search of that elusive, luminous colour that has come to define her art - from the most ethereal to the most sharp-edged depiction of the natural world. She works with white silk, dipping its folds in permanent inks, creating that diffuse, layered suspension of colour where the images seem to float as if underwater. Autumn leaves, summer flower heads, the gossamer touch of plastic film or cheesecloth pressed to wet watercolour, slowly she builds her depth of field. Poured paintings where the colour moves in waves across the canvas, frost paintings with images finely etched by the cold, each experiment expands her range of effects. Even her titles - whimsical, elegiac or provocative - tease the viewer, suggestive of multiple possibilities.
Intuitive, bold, and yet subtle in its manifestations, the conversation with colour goes on. Sandy listens, waits, allowing the material to speak and the images to emerge and coalesce. What remains is a testament to one woman's vision and the dedication that yearly renews her quest.