Fortune Gallery is currently presenting this year’s Winter Show, featuring paintings, sculpture, and other artwork from 21 local artists. Mark Gruenhage is one of these artists; Gruenhage says that while painting, his primary emotion is calmness, because the act of painting is cathartic, allowing him to work out his stress and emotions.
“‘Calm,’ honestly, is a pretty good, encompassing word,” says Gruenhage. “When I do a lot of these kinds of paintings it’s kind of a meditative thing for me, so a lot of any thinking or built-up emotion just kind of fades away when I begin to paint, so it becomes a very calming thing for me to do. I’m often a very meticulous and heavy thinker during the day, so when I can paint it feels very nice to have that fade away and turn off.”
Gruenhage says that his paintings aren’t made with any specific goal or destination in mind, but are simply a means of expression. This also helps limit perfectionism by allowing a painting to come into being organically.
“When it comes to painting, it’s been very meditative and therapeutic, it’s been a nice escape from the world in a way,” he says. “A lot of the painting I’ve done thus far has been purely to be a form of expression more than anything. I’ve tried very hard not to have a very specific kind of end goal in mind. It helps let go when it comes to that perfectionism, that forced expectation of what I want the end goal to be. It feels very nice to let a painting unfold on its own.”
Perfectionism, too, is challenged by the very nature of painting—there’s no undo button. A dab of paint applied to the canvas is a commitment. Gruenhage says that he appreciates this limitation because it allows him to practice letting go of imperfections, a practice which extends to the rest of his life.
“I’ve kind of grown to appreciate those moments more with these paintings,” he says. “I don’t necessarily want them to be perfectly refined in how I expect them to be, so when I’m blotting on the canvas, and something is maybe out of line, or out of expectation, I just pleasantly welcome it. It feels a lot like life in that sense, where I’ll maybe plan out my day and expect it to go some certain way, but that’s hardly ever the case. I’ll have a sort of general idea of how my day will go, and I have to let it unfold from there, and I’ve tried to adapt that same general mindset into my paintings. I love the freedom of not having to worry about something having to be perfect.”
Gruenhage says that Media, his blotted acrylic abstract painting in the exhibit, is an expression on how, in the chaos of reality as we know it, so much is happening all around us that we are unaware of, beyond the small dot that is our conscious perception.
“For me, the painting encompasses the thought around how a lot of media, there’s always a ton of stuff going on in the world, but rarely do we ever see it, or are aware of it,” he says. “The dot was more or less to represent the very small pinhole of what we do see, or what gets shown to us. News, social media, culture, it’s very interesting how it’s all kind of refined, and caters to a very small dot of what you actually do get to see, when there’s kind of a plethora of things out there that we aren’t aware of.”
Winter Show
Until Sunday, January 29
Fortune Gallery
fortunegallery.ca