Leier and Barton - Review

By Robert Amos April 12, 2004

} Leier and Barton - Review By Robert Amos Grant Leier and Nixie Barton are married, and each is a popular and successful artist. They have turned their acreage near Yellow Point into a wonderland of gardening and creative play, and also have a gallery and gift shop there, open from April to December. Currently, a display of their latest paintings is on show at West End Gallery (until February 27). “We’re decorative artists - and proud of it!”, Leier has declared. He makes the sort of paintings people like to look at. Though he often inscribes trite homilies on his smaller works, these canvases aren’t about “meaning”: the first thing one notices are his sizzling juxtapositions of colour. Nixie Barton, Yellow Point Oaks, acrylic on canvas, on show at the West End Gallery, 1203 Broad Street, Victoria (388-0009, www.westendgalleryltd.com) Heterogenous assemblages of objects mingle in his compositions. Chinese jars and songbirds and magnolia blossoms seem thrown together, teetering just short of chaos. Every painterly technique that comes to hand is tossed into his visual blender: drips, squeegee sweeps, glazes overlaid, all sorts of appliquéed stuff. Somehow what results is a perfect backdrop for bouquet of roses, martinis and a romantic dinner for two. Nixie Barton has, naturally, been influenced by her husband. She shares his freedom and confidence. Yet she goes her own way. The latest chapter in her continuous evolution has lead her to landscape. Built around a horizon line, her images are grounded in deep earthy fields of red which she lays down with a trowel and then ploughs up with a scraper. This earth is overhung with cloudy skies. Precipitation rains down from saturated clouds of moody, muted hue. Despite the punctuation of Tuscan “popsicle” trees, the painted atmosphere is late autumn or west coast winter. Nixie Barton, acrylic on canvas Each landscape is mated with a sidebar, an appended colour block or two. Some of these counterpoint panels have the look of leatherette, of wallpaper stencilled in bronze. Others feature inky swatches clipped from a Chinese calendar and painted in. A judicious garnish of gold leaf often adds a rich finish to her mix. Barton likes to play with her materials. “When I start painting, I use gel,” she informs me. “It’s like icing a cake. I begin with a black ground, move lots and lots of paint around, and build up textures. When I scratch through it all, the black ground shows through.” This artist begins in an abstract mode, and ends up representing something. As she says, “things happen”. Does she build up this density of effect by a slow accumulation of layers? “No!”, she insists. “I just do it in one great slosh! It sounds stupid, but I just keep doing a painting till I like it”. Grant Leier, acrylic on canvas What with motherhood, gardening, and dealing with an intrusive public, how does she find time? “Between 9 and 3 - that’s my time,” she tells me. “I have a studio of my own now - it was finished a year ago December and I have never painted more paintings in my life. Once I got out of the dining room I just went nuts!”. Last year, with her husband, she had four exhibitions (in Banff, Edmonton, Toronto and Victoria) and created more than a hundred paintings. After the pictures are shipped to eager galleries, they never come back. Barton tells me it’s surprisingly hard for them even to hold back anything for their own gallery at Yellow Point. The current batch, with their extended horizons and linear drawing style, look to me a bit like the prairies. She is quick to squash that rumour. “I have never lived on the Prairies,” she explains. Maybe it’s the farmland around their island home having an influence. Grant Leier, acrylic on canvas One of the paintings is a striking scene called Round Island, showing a cute litte treed island which looks a bit like Algonquin Park. “Actually there is a Round Island,” Barton tells me. “My family owns property on Mudge Island and it’s just off the shore there.” The rich orange underpainting, marbled like swirling fudge and overlaid with incandescent violet, may be her own interpretation. Many an artist, having developed a sure-fire technique and instantly recognizable subject matter, would rest on their laurels. It must be hard not to remain content, satisfy a ready market and keep the gallery owners happy. But Barton and Leier amaze me by their constant progress and development. When I first interviewed Leier, he was at that time doing photo realist paintings of his sister and white geese, and pasting onto them every variety of gewgaw and knick knack. Barton was working at Prestige Framing, and creating large and simple still life canvases. Yet every time I visit their latest show, they have moved on. Last year I discovered Grant Leier coffee tables and garden ornaments. This year he has placed his extravagant object-scapes on backgrounds of streaky washes of eye-popping colour. And Nixie Barton, who was dedicated to gold leaf and shrine-shaped panels last year, has brought out thickly gelled landscapes, some of them ten times as long as they are wide. Whatever next? I can hardly wait. ___________________________________________ Copyright © 2003 Robert Amos Robert Amos is an artist and art writer who lives in Victoria, B.C.. He can be contacted by e-mail and you can view his paintings at www.robertamos.com

• Posted: 2004-04-12