>>PREVIEW
100 PORTRAITS OF CALGARY ARTISTS
Sarah Holtom
Runs until September 15
Living Art Centre
Imagine painting a portrait a day. How about three portraits a day? Now keep going until you have 100 Portraits of Calgary Artists. That is how Sarah Holtom spent her summer.
Holtom is a 25--year-old recent graduate from ACAD who has been painting many, many portraits of friends, family and commissioned works for years. "I have always liked painting portraits," says Holtom. "It’s scary and exciting at the same time, getting the person just right, I don’t even think of painting while I’m doing the work, I just focus and paint until it’s done."
Holtom proposed a project for funding through the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, painting 100 portraits over a limited time of Calgary artists and this summer she did just that.
"I just finished the last one on the night of August 31, says Holtom. "At my peak I painted four portraits a day, but that was too much for me, so I stuck to three."
So who were the subjects? "I started with three of my favourite artists and it just exploded out from there," she says. "Not all of the people I painted are visual artists, but they are from all the arts. My first portraits were of Bentley Wilkes, Sarah Ford and Alison Yip and then they each named three people that they knew, and then I just kept that going."
Her subjects have not all been visual artists, but from the entire spectrum of Calgary’s artistic community. Poets, writers, actors, playwrights and many others in the arts were possible candidates for Holtom's oils. "Some of my subjects included Chris Cran, Grant Reddick, Craig LeBlanc, Meghan Kirk, Brandon Doty, Bill Baksa and Eric Hamelin," says Holtom.
After painting, say, the first 30, how do you still stay fresh without the project becoming stale? "I had a rule, never sway from the artists’ picks," she says. "I let them choose where to be painted. Every background is different, and although the basic elements are there, there is enough variation. I even notice that my style changes with my own moods from day to day, gutsy brush strokes one day and finicky the next."
Running all over the city, from location to location for each portrait, Holtom, laughing, describes the experience as becoming a "crazy donkey" having to haul all of her equipment with her to some unusual locations. "One of the other rules I had in place was to never go back to touch up the paintings afterward," she says. "I painted two portraits in Bragg Creek and we were just swarmed by bugs, so they got everywhere, including in the paint and on the paintings."
Even after a summer spent running all over Calgary, in and out of houses, playgrounds and cemeteries, painting 100 portraits has not burnt out Sarah Holtom’s interest in portraiture. "I still enjoy painting portraits – they are more fun than landscape painting because it has to look like someone." |
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