In the mail this morning, a catalogue from Ron Shuebrook of his show alongside Carol Wainio at the Dalhousie Art Gallery. Ron’s memoir of being a painter was published in Issue 76 of CNQ, and can be found here.
It’s a lovely little catalogue, complete with 10 pages of colour plates, divided between the artists. Gary Michael Dault offers a short appreciation of the work of Shuebrook in a piece called ‘Pauseless’:
Ron Shuebrook: Monkey & Rope
…Shuebrook’s panoply of blacks, whites, grays and creams (hundreds of shades of each) — gritty, granular, dusty, sooty, chalky, slippery, sugary, greasy, powdery — add up to an alternate chroma … In a black-and-white Shuebrook you get density rather than hue, pressure rather than tone and value, graphic ache rather than balm. …. Shuebrook emplys a big, assured, claiming kind of painterly handwriting — that gulps up the arabesque-courses of his pictures with such a voracious appetite…
I’ve only come across a few Shuebrook paintings in real life, and the plates in books and magazines never do them justice. You lose the sense of depth that is in the work, the colour, the size, the physicality of them. Even in a room full of other paintings at the Art Gallery of Windsor, when I was there for an event, I found my eyes returning to Shuebrook’s work: this long before I knew who he was, and, in fact, who was the artist of the painting. In this particular instance it was a smaller canvas, perhaps 3 feet by 5 feet, bright yellow and almost typographic. There were larger paintings in the room, but they paled progressively as the evening went on next to the colour of Shuebrook’s. There was much more life in his lines and shapes and colour than in the surrounding landscapes and cityscapes, so much so that all I can now remember of the other paintings in the room is their rather turgidly beige uniformity. I remember what they were, but they did not imprint in any fashion in the memory. Shuebrook’s painting — though I forget the name of it — remains brilliantly lodged there, and I’ve not forgotten his name since.