Want to experience an artistic epiphany? Go see the Revelstoke Art Gallery’s new shows

By David F. Rooney

If you always wanted to experience the kind of epiphany available through fine art then don’t miss the latest offerings from Keisha Treber and Robin Wiltse at the Revelstoke Art Gallery which opened with their new shows on Friday, September 13.

Keisha Treber is one of the most prolific young artists from Revelstoke and her show, Nature at its Finest — A Celebration of Color,  demonstrates her skill with a brush and a palette of paint and her productivity. Her paintings are, by turns glorious and haunting anthems to Nature.

The second show of note is Robin Wiltse’s exhibition, entitled Felted Works. Robin is a fabric artist in Kaslo and her work has to be seen to believed. Her works are magnificent tapestries made of hand-felted wool. Some, like her work Birch Trees and Strata, are relatively small; others like her magnificent Redwing Blackbirds and Cat Tails are riveting pieces of art.

The third show is my own Trail of the Bear. For the most part they are workmanlike and, in three instances frankly a little surreal. The main piece for the show, the 6′ x 4′ painting Where the Bears Are, met with a sad fate when I was loading it in the back of SUV. It got hung  up on a box in and the top stretcher bar and two vertical struts in the center broke, with the knife-like point of the stretcher bar piercing the canvas and leaving a 5-inch long L-shaped rip in the center. Poof! Three months of work went out the window!

Fellow painter Margo Goodman suggested that I might be able to salvage it by cutting the canvas in two, then re-stretching the two pieces and framing them together. I can see what she’s getting but it won’t work because — as I feared — it would mean cutting a four-inch strip of canvas right down the middle of the painting. I’d essentially have repaint the entire painting to make it work  and if I’m going to do that I might as well just by a new monster canvas and repaint it from scratch. And I will do that because my image of people dancing in Grizzly Plaza with its bear statues in the foreground and a star-lit Mount Macpherson in the background is too good to let go.

At any rate, it’s fair to say that two of the three shows on offer are magnificent and well worth seeing. The art gallery at 310 Wilson Street, just behind Days Inn, is open Tuesday through Saturday from 12 pm until 4 pm. For more information phone 250-814-0261 or send an e-mail to info@revelstokevisualarts.com.

In the meantime here are some images from the show that we hope you’ll enjoy: