Ian Penn

Responding to the landscape

“ReView 2” by Ian Penn.

Ian Penn is not a new name for regular visitors to the Zack Gallery, which has exhibited his work before. “I like this gallery,” Penn told the Independent. “It’s like a public marketplace. It’s transparent and open. Children come in. Older people. People on the way from their lunch or the gym. The gallery is accessible, the way art should be. I could show at a traditional gallery, but I don’t want to.”

Penn makes one exception to this statement – for his homeland, Australia. “I have a gallery in Australia that represents me, and I exhibit there frequently, once or twice a year,” he said. “Last year, I was an artist-in-residence at that gallery. I gave artistic workshops to high school children. It was fun.”

His current exhibition at the Zack, From the Deck: View and ReView, is dedicated to landscapes, specifically the scenery he sees from the deck of his house: trees and mountains, water and clouds. Penn has painted these landmarks in different lights and different seasons. “I tried to capture different moods,” he said. “Some are grand, panoramic. Others are smaller, more intimate.”

He explained his idea behind the show. “View and re-view are two parts of the process. I look at the view from my house deck, have been looking at it for years. I enjoy the landscape from a single view. I take photographs. I sketch it multiple times. It’s my immediate response to the landscape. I’m part of it. I’m mapping it. This is ‘View,’ but it is not the territory, just a map. It is my understanding of the place.”

Penn’s View paintings are more abstract, sometimes just splashes of colour. What is important to the artist is that every element appears in the right size and shape in relation to the other elements. “I measure all the distances at this stage and mark the proportions. How far is this treetop from that ship passing through? How large are these bushes compared to that shoreline? I make lots of drawings.”

The second part of the process, the review, is done in the studio, later. “This is the second part of my response,” he explained. “I’d think: what is important in that idea? A ‘ReView’ is my emotional and physical answer to the ‘View’ and the landscape. It’s all about the place itself, the place and the painting. At this stage, I’m recreating the territory.”

photo - Ian Penn at the opening of his latest solo exhibition at the Zack Gallery, which runs until April 28 — Ian Penn at the opening of his latest solo exhibition at the Zack Gallery, which runs until April 28. *(photo by Olga Livshin)*

Unlike the bold brush strokes of his Views, most of his ReViews are more detailed, while still exploring the same landscape. And the ratio of abstract versus figurative slants towards the figurative. “I’m interested where representation and abstraction interact,” he admitted.

In his ReViews, a tree becomes a more detailed tree, not just a blob of yellow, even while maintaining its impressionistic abstract profile. A ship becomes more identifiable as a ship, not simply a dark squiggle. And a cloud can’t be mistaken for anything else.

In fact, clouds play a huge role in most of the paintings on display: light and fluffy in one image, heavy and menacing in another. “Clouds change constantly; that’s why they interest me. I’m fascinated by change, by periods of transition,” said Penn. “That’s why most of these paintings are done in spring or autumn. Those are the seasons of change. In summer, the landscape is full and the sky is clear, but, with autumn, comes change. The colours of the leaves change. When the leaves fall, the shapes of the trees change. The bones of the landscapes are transformed. The weather changes. Same in spring. By exploring those changes, I’m addressing the changes in our lives.”

By the juxtaposition of constant change within the same view – from one location – Penn follows in the footsteps of one of his favourite artists, Paul Cezanne. “I studied Cezanne. He painted Mont Sainte-Victoire countless times, all different,” Penn said. “He changed the landscape genre forever, took it apart and re-created it.”

Penn’s investigation of the landscape as an art form goes further. “A traditional landscape is horizontal, with certain set dimensions,” he explained. “I’m challenging those dimensions, trying landscapes of different formats. A portrait shape. A diptych, which is much wider than a traditional landscape. I’m playing with different geometry. What if the two parts of a diptych are of different widths: one square, another a wider rectangle? What if both parts are off-squares?”

Penn’s experiments with the shapes of his paintings, with the changing of weather and seasons, makes the show diverse. The exhibition demonstrates the richness of landscape as an art form.

“Landscape as we know it is relatively new in the modern Western art,” he said. “Before the Renaissance, landscape was mostly a background for figures in the composition. It only became a separate art form in the 16th and 17th centuries, after the paint tubes became small enough that artists could take them out of the studios, to paint on locations. That was what the Group of Seven did. That is what I do.”

Penn’s show runs until April 28 at the Zack. For more information about his work, visit ianpenn.com.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

Exploring winter landscapes

Ian Penn’s exhibit Winter Paintings: The Figure in and on the Landscape opened March 10 at Zack Gallery. (photo by Olga Livshin)

The theme of Ian Penn’s solo show at Zack Gallery is winter. The artist’s love for winter, for the mountains of British Columbia and for skiing reverberates through the gallery.

“I’m affected by the seasons, by my surroundings,” said Penn in an interview with the Independent. “I only paint current seasons. In summer, I paint summer; in the fall, I paint its rioting colors. In winter, I paint snow and skiing.”

Penn spends lots of his free time in the mountains. “Our whole family likes to ski,” he said. “When we first moved to B.C., we bought our first place in the mountains before we settled in Vancouver.”

Penn has been skiing since his youth in Australia, but it was cross-country skiing until he immigrated to Canada and saw the mountains. At the age of 35, he started alpine skiing – and loved it.

Around 2000, he went a step further. He joined the ski patrol in Whistler, volunteering part-time his professional skills as a doctor. He still does that. “I like the ski patrol community. They are nice people,” he said.

About the same time, he also became seriously interested in painting, which eventually led to a degree from Emily Carr.

Penn has a general fascination with landscapes, especially mountain scenes, as an art form. He has painted dozens of landscapes, in every season, and some of his favorite areas to paint are around Whistler and the Callaghan Valley.

“I was always interested in mapping a territory, but a map and a territory are not the same,” he explained. “The painting of a landscape is not the same as if you stand in that place, experience it with all your senses. Or with devices – photo cameras and cellphones. I wanted to capture that difference in my paintings. That’s why I started a series of diptychs. My diptychs are like a single painting in two parts.”

There are several diptychs on display in the gallery. One is a landscape, a vista with the majestic mountains and forest, with tiny human figures. The second affords a closer look. The human figure is larger, the artist’s focus has narrowed, and the people in these paintings are doing something, engaging with the mountains. They whip down the slopes on their skis. They stop to take photos. They enjoy the invigorating exercise and the beauty around them. They laugh and horse around.

Penn captures their movement in his paintings. His objects are not static. They don’t pose. They are just going about their business, and the artist is going about his.

“Initially, I wanted to paint on location,” he said. “I want to paint everywhere I go, but I couldn’t do that in winter. It’s too cold both for my hands and for the paints. Or it might snow. What I do when I’m in the mountains skiing, I take photos and make quick drawings.”

The drawings provide him with the first impression, the emotional subtext. The photographs he uses for details.

“All the details in my landscapes are accurate. The precision is important to me. I want to be able to navigate by them. I want the ski patrol to be able to use my paintings when they have to rescue someone,” he said, only half-joking.

Many of his paintings have personal stories attached, some of which are more obvious than others. In one painting, there was to have been a person but there isn’t; the close-up view is surprisingly empty of life. “He got erased. I erased him,” Penn said. “He was a vain fellow. He was dancing around, making selfies of himself with his cellphone, turning so he would get every possible angle. He didn’t notice anyone else, almost stepped on my ski. At first, I wanted to show it, as a portrait of self-absorption, but I disliked the fellow so much, I finally erased his figure from my painting. But, mostly, I want my paintings to tell your stories, not mine.”

The dominating color in all of the paintings is white, of course, overset by green forest and dark mountains. Only people provide splashes of color: a red jacket or a yellow parka.

“I use five different whites for the snow,” Penn said. “And then there are color patches reflecting the surroundings. Snow is never simply white. It’s complex and a challenge. It’s always different. And so is the sky: blue but different in each painting. But I never used black in any of these paintings. When I needed the dark, I mixed colors.”

Penn paints landscapes because they are endless. “Wherever I go, there is a new and amazing landscape waiting for me. Painting them, making drawings, photographing slows me down, allows me the time to look, to see the beauty around me.”

Winter Paintings: The Figure in and on the Landscape will be at the Zack until April 3. For more information about Penn and his work, visit ianpenn.com. An interview with Penn about his exhibit last year, called Pole, can be found at jewishindependent.ca/memorials-to-millions.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

Memorials to millions

Ian Penn’s exhibit at the Zack Gallery, Pole, “isn’t happy but it’s genuine.” (photo by Olga Livshin)

The poignant tale behind Pole, Ian Penn’s new multimedia exhibit at the Zack Gallery, is a bleak travelogue detailing his recent journey to Poland.

Although Penn’s family came from Poland – his parents were lucky to have escaped the Holocaust and settled in Australia – he never wanted to visit the country of his ancestors. “My mother said she would never set a toe in Poland,” he told the Independent.

Growing up in Australia, Penn moved to Vancouver, where he worked as a cardiologist for many years. He is mainly retired now but still teaches at the University of British Columbia and works as a medic with the emergency-response ski patrol in Whistler.

“When I retired, I enrolled in Emily Carr,” he said. “I graduated in 2010 with a bachelor’s in fine arts but I’ve always kept a visual diary, since university. I have hundreds of little albums at home. Wherever I am, wherever I go, I draw and write in them. It’s how I explore the world.”

He paints regularly, landscapes and figurative images. “For me, painting is a way of telling a story, one of many. There are other ways, too: words, sculpture, video, photography. I used the multimedia approach for this show because I wanted to bring all those ways together, see how they fit. The show is a story of Jewish soul.”

Penn found his subject in Poland. He had resisted making the trip for a long time, until a couple years ago. “My daughter said to me then, ‘It’s time to visit your history,’ so I made the decision to go,” Penn explained. “I have a friend in Australia. We have known each other for a long time. He is a Pole, he speaks Polish, and he wanted to take me. He said we should both read a few books first to prepare ourselves, books about the plight of Jews in Poland during the war, but written by Poles, not Jews. We didn’t want to go as tourists. We wanted to understand.”

Nonetheless, Poland shocked him. “There are almost no Jews left there, and the ones who remain don’t know anything about Jewish culture. I went to a synagogue and I had to say Kiddush because nobody there could speak Hebrew. But the Poles – they exploit Jewish history. They charge 23 euros for a trip to Auschwitz. They have those happy golf carts all around Krakow and they take you to the Schindler’s factory and to the ghetto. They sell Jewish souvenirs, but who made them? Not Jews. This is not how you engage in history. They made a commodity out of our tragedy, of the Jews killed by the millions. It’s like Horror Disneyland. I couldn’t stay there more than one week.”

Penn found most of the Jews of Poland in the cemetery. “There, every stone has a name written on the tombstones, remembered, while those who died in Auschwitz are just dust. I learned that Nazis burnt 1,000 people an hour in the ovens in Auschwitz. I tried to wrap my head about the number. That’s why I did this show. It’s about those thousands of souls.”

All of the works displayed in the show bear the same name, “1000 Marks.” By creating the paintings, Penn wanted to visualize his non-memories, remember something he had never witnessed. Five paintings are similar: dead trees, brown and dreary, wooden poles striving to reach the sky, one pole for every Jewish soul that didn’t have their name written somewhere. Together, they form a memorial.

A couple other paintings have a subtitle: “From the Village to the Ramp.” They are painful to view, powerfully evoking the horrors of the Holocaust. So does the entrance to the gallery, decorated with two real wooden poles, with bark still on in some places, unpolished and branchless. The “Welcome Back” mat underneath them doesn’t look particularly welcoming either. There was a sign at the entrance to Auschwitz, too, and the correlations reverberate in the air.

“This show isn’t happy but it’s genuine,” said Penn. “It’s my response to the entertainment industry they made of the catastrophe. Their tourist trips have nothing to do with our dead families.”

The show also includes a few short videos, two of them filmed at the Jewish cemetery. The screens are mounted to the walls like paintings, continually running loops of footage. “I shot them myself,” said Penn. “There is serenity at the cemetery. And lots of greenery, living trees. I saw a man restoring the text on one of the tombstones and filmed him. I didn’t talk to him, didn’t ask him anything. He was doing a holy job. That was enough.”

A few more wooden poles, also part of the exhibition, are placed outside of the Zack Gallery. They are suspended above the atrium, where the stairs lead down to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

“They are uprooted, like all of us whose parents left Europe,” said Penn. “The poles come from the UBC Endowment Lands and from the Whistler area. They remind me of the trees in the Jewish cemetery but they are also my connection to this place, to Canada.”

The show Pole opened on Sept. 10 and continues until Oct. 11.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].