Sentimental journey

Ah, sentimentalism, it is a balm, it is a trap. It is the comfort food of emotions, the ready pleasure of the fattening bite that we forgive even as it turns to flab. If only it worked so well in art, where even a little flab is enough extra weight to bring you crashing down from the wall.

It’s one thing to have sentimental feelings when seeing a piece of art — say, you see a painting of a farm, and you grew up on a farm so you savour a moment of nostalgia, though your feelings will not be shared when the painting is seen by the next person, who did not grow up on a farm.

The trouble begins when there are no layers other than sentimentalism or nostalgia, and the singular purpose of the painting is to evoke sentimental feelings, to churn up the comfort-food of warm memories. That’s why I cringed when I read the news release for Crystal Beshara’s exhibition of new paintings at Orange Art Gallery in Ottawa. The release says, “It is with this brand new body of work that she shares a cosy slice of nostalgia.”

When I read the words “new paintings” on the same page with the words “cosy slice of nostalgia” I want to run away, fast and far. I’m glad I didn’t, because Crystal Beshara is learning to tame her sentimental heart, and the artistic growth can be seen in the paintings — some strong, some not so much — now at Orange Gallery.

Beshara grew up on a farm in the Ottawa Valley and those memories are, naturally enough, impressed into her work. All of the paintings in this exhibition, which is titled Winter’s Promise, reflect farm life, from the portraits of owls to the larger paintings of cattle that are the centrepieces of the show, and the latter do it most successfully.

The smaller painting Barn Owl is oil on wood, with most of the board left bare, which forces the eye to focus strongly on the owl itself. To withstand this scrutiny the owl needs a fine detail that it lacks, so the whole thing has an unfinished look, as if the artist hoped its presence alone — the owl’s sentimental place as a character of barn life — would be compelling.

Another oil on wood, titled Jersey , shows a floppy-eared, doe-eyed calf also set against a background of bare, negative space. The image veers dangerously towards cute, which has in the past been, depending on your perspective, a good or bad thing in Beshara’s work. Hey, I like cute as much as the next person, but in its place. Cute is not profound or even meaningful in any way and, therefore, it is not the basis of compelling art.

That’s not a problem in another of her bare-board paintings, titled First Frost, which is a close-up of a dead sunflower in the field. Here the aspect of farm-life shown is inevitable death, and cute is replaced by melancholy, which is always more interesting. Beshara’s sunflower is well composed, though the painting was undermined by the touches of gold-leaf that reflected the gallery light in a most distracting fashion.

She uses gold leaf elsewhere to better effect and, like all the most successful paintings in the exhibition, it is not on wooden board but on canvas. The larger painting Into the Mist , shows a heard of cows crossing a stream and slowly disappearing into the icy mist over a frozen field. Here Beshara presents a scene that is at once nostalgic for her but still offers something substantial to the majority of viewers who did not grow up on a farm.

She hits all her high notes with her large paintings of cows. Winter Storm shows three rather woolly cows (don’t ask me what kind, I’m a city boy) standing in the greyness of a winter storm and staring — silent and placid — at the viewer. I could almost feel the cold, moist air, and the cocoon-ish effect of standing outdoors in a snowstorm. Beshara has allowed a few drips of grey paint to flow from the sky down over the snowy ground and here the deliberate lack of finish is more effective, as if to knock the viewer out of a reverie.

Black Angus (40 by 60 inches, oil on canvas) is the centrepiece of the exhibition and deservedly so. Here a single, black cow stands before a leafless woodland wrapped in icy mist and next to a dirty, half-frozen pool of water. Beshara has painted the water with broad, messy strokes and it creates an intriguing contrast with the detail on the rest of the canvas. The painting isn’t cute and it sure isn’t cosy, but it is compelling. It may be sentimental and nostalgic, but it’s more than that and it’s Beshara’s best work to date.