For the month of April, some wide prairie skies will be up on the walls of the Humboldt and District Museum and Gallery (HDMG).
From April 1-23, a show entitled "A Wide Horizon: Terry Fenton," part of the Organization of Saskatchewan Arts Council's Arts on the Move Program, will be calling Humboldt home.
The paintings on display, by Saskatchewan artist Terry Fenton, portray the Saskatchewan prairie landscape in an evocative way, a way that anyone who has experienced this province's living skies can understand.
Fenton has documented his time travelling through Saskatchewan with these paintings, capturing exact movements of uninterrupted views of land and sky.
Navigating the secondary highways and grid roads on tips and instinct, Fenton toured and detoured around south western Saskatchewan one summer. He captured landscapes near Swift Current, Gravelbourg, Moose Jaw, LaFleche, Eastend, Admiral, Val Marie, Shaunavon and Gull Lake, just to name a few.
The works that are part of this show have been painted with oil paint on paper and are intimate in scale.
"Because of their apparent lack of scenery, the open prairies haven't been much painted by anyone... I'm drawn south and west to the grasslands... because the colour and light there is so luminous. Because the solutions found by painters from the past don't work well in the wide-open spaces, I look for new ones."
Fenton was born in Regina in 1940 and has been involved in the development of Saskatchewan's art community for the past 35 years. His landscape paintings are in national and international collections, and he was the director of the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon from 1993-97. He is now retired and a full-time artist who lives and works in Saskatoon.
The show's stop in Humboldt is sponsored by Conexus and the Humboldt Area Arts Council.
