VANS COMMUNITY SERIES: LES RAMSAY
5 years ago painter/sculptor Les Ramsay relocated his practice from the bustle of city life in Vancouver to a serene home/studio along B.C.’s scenic Sunshine Coast. Alongside his partner, artist Colleen Heslin, the two have created a space wholly their own in Powell River. Focusing on art from scratch, Les has taken on new influences, inspired by the captivating scenery of this updated environment. His metaphorical art practice is rooted in methods of formal abstraction with an intuitive material processes developed from both inside and outside the studio. Exhibiting his work throughout Canada, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany and across the US, Les has come to revere the serenity of an art practice at a slow pace.
Les Ramsay: BORDERCROSSINGS
“The sea is everything,” wrote Jules Verne in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. “It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe.… It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides.” As such, no human vision of the sea can be finite; each connects and merges with those of others elsewhere, sometimes quite distant in space and time.
Visitors to Les Ramsay’s recent exhibition “The Adventures of Atrevida Reef” will have encountered such a dynamic. As the media release states, “Atrevida is Spanish for ‘bold’ and references significant landmarks near the artist’s rural studio/home” on BC’s Sunshine Coast. Atrevida Reef is indeed an underwater feature off that coast a short way north of Tla’amin First Nation. Yet, the exhibition’s visual language traverses a broader circuit, pointing at themes and motifs from oceanic environments and seafaring cultures around the globe, even across millennia. The ocean divides cultures from one another, true—but to a soul with a boat, it is a superhighway around the world and has been since antiquity.