{"id":21197,"date":"2021-06-22T09:44:43","date_gmt":"2021-06-22T16:44:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=21197"},"modified":"2021-06-22T09:44:43","modified_gmt":"2021-06-22T16:44:43","slug":"victoria-artist-showcases-two-years-of-art-in-new-exhibit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2021\/06\/22\/victoria-artist-showcases-two-years-of-art-in-new-exhibit\/","title":{"rendered":"Victoria artist showcases two years of art in new exhibit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Local French-Canadian artist St\u00e9phanie Prest essentially put the rest of her artistic life on hold for two years to make the art that eventually made up her exhibit Big Sky<\/em>. Between when she started the work for the exhibit and now, Prest has been through multiple chapters of her life. Things have changed; she\u2019s processed what\u2019s happened and she\u2019s grown. But professionally, Big Sky<\/em> was her main focus.<\/p>\n

Whether it\u2019s moving studios, coping with the pandemic, or dealing with intense personal changes, each image on display carries a story behind it, a story that only Prest and close family and friends know about, which is just how she likes it.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople who see them, they don\u2019t know,\u201d she says. \u201cThey don\u2019t know what\u2019s behind each painting, so I think there\u2019s safety in that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
St\u00e9phanie Prest’s “McMorran Beach” (photo provided).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Prest moved studios a lot during the making of the art in Big Sky<\/em>, which was stressful, she says. But the pandemic allowed her to take her time with each piece in a way that she normally may not have been able to. For example, she was able to take extra time with her painting \u201cMcMorran Beach.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI fixed it, and I was so much happier with it,\u201d she says about \u201cMcMorran Beach.\u201d \u201cI was scared that I would hate that painting, and that I wouldn\u2019t want to show it, and that it would be my least favourite.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prest says that sharing art that\u2019s a really poignant part of her life is only possible because she\u2019s in a new chapter now.<\/p>\n

\u201cKnowing that, it\u2019s almost like it\u2019s not a part of my present, it\u2019s a part of my past, and so I think that it\u2019s easier to show,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Prest has always enjoyed working on large-scale paintings that come from her photographs. As we\u2019re talking, she\u2019s sitting on Dallas Road, a landscape she\u2019s painted countless times; as anyone who has been there knows, the sky is prominent in that setting.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m obsessed with water,\u201d she says. \u201cMy inspiration comes from the ocean, and I love water, but I was putting a lot of water in my paintings\u2026 I wanted to focus on how much the sky changes around here and how beautiful they all can be, and the different moods that each sky creates.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prest hadn\u2019t done too much work with clouds prior to this exhibit; in Big Sky<\/em>, they are a main focus. She wanted to experiment with the different moods clouds create, and it wasn\u2019t easy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re really hard to do because there\u2019s nothing grounded in them. They\u2019re airy. I work very much in light and shadow, and so, they\u2019re not like that,\u201d she says. \u201cIt took a while to figure out, and I worked it through on several of the paintings. I\u2019m not even sure I figured it out by any means, but it\u2019s quite difficult because of all of the levels. It keeps going background, foreground, background, foreground. They\u2019re really quite difficult. I found it extremely challenging. And I like that. I liked that I challenged myself. I didn\u2019t want to just paint the same seascape that I had been painting for 10 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prest loves painting large scale because of the realism involved in it, she says. Smaller paintings don\u2019t have the same impact.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always painted life-size,\u201d she says. \u201cI obviously can\u2019t paint the sky and the ocean life-size, but I feel like the bigger it is, the more it feels like the scope of what it feels like to stand at Dallas Road.\u201d<\/p>\n

Big Sky
\n<\/em>Until Monday, June 28
\nFortune Gallery
\nfortunegallery.ca<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Local French-Canadian artist St\u00e9phanie Prest essentially put the rest of her artistic life on hold for two years to make the art that eventually made up her exhibit Big Sky. Between when she started the work for the exhibit and now, Prest has been through multiple chapters of her life. Things have changed; she\u2019s processed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21198,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-webexclusive"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21197"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21199,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21197\/revisions\/21199"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}