Low Down Articles
Artist Profiles - Michael Sproule
Article 62 of 73
From the book Artists of the Gatineau Hill by Catherine Joyce. This article first appeared in the "Artist Profiles" column in the June 22, 2005 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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Painting Motion Pictures
In another life Michael Sproule would have been a filmmaker. To walk into a gallery hung with his massive paintings is to see the land in motion. The charged energy of his geological formations speaks of the history of Canada, of the places we call home. He works by series - revisioning mountains, glaciers, canyons, the sandpits of the Gatineau or the Badlands of the Prairies. You could imagine one continuous tracking shot sweeping the walls of some grand hall where his paintings would re-enact the story that surges within and without us - the bare bones drama of a northern people.
As a small boy summering at Wolf Lake with his four siblings, Michael was a self-confessed loner, intent upon looking at the world around him. His connection with Nature was forged there - those long ago beginnings of discovering what was going on inside him, and of fostering the ability to see abstract forms hidden within multiplicity. Years later this gift would become his art: the stripping away of extraneous detail, the zooming in on elemental structures, the careful placement of line, the subtle nuances of colour - to create rhythm, energy, texture - embodying the land as living entity.
Born in Ottawa in 1934, Michael's first love had been film and photography. As a young man he managed the old Capitol Theatre, then later Eastview Photo with its three Ottawa stores. For ten years he set up and ran the Ottawa Carleton Regional Media Centre. But the desire to do something more personal and creative never left him.
At the urging of his geologist brother to express something of the national ethos, Michael began to paint. He was fascinated by movement and energy - by the anatomy of the land as a structure for seeing, for articulating story. With his grandfather a phoographer and his father a mining engineer, Michael began researching geology, looking backwards and forwards as a way of identifying his place within history, exploring the massive uplifts and glacial reformations that have shaped Canada. He took photographs, remolding what he saw, painting his series of emblematic forms as a dialogue with what made him - this ancient, majestic land.
"You know when it's working. The painting takes over. Something organic occurs. And the viewer floats within that canvas as all the elements interlock, leading and satisfying the eye."
Serving on numerous juries and committees in the region, Michael also taught at the Ottawa School of Art for ten years. With the support and encouragement of his wife Mary, a teacher, he has been painting full time since 1976, and from 1985 at his home in Chelsea.
"To be a painter is a treat and a privilege. I have never been happier."