Rural landscapes with an urban eye

Realist painter Peter Rotter discusses his lifelong passion

By Lina Nijmeh

In Peter Rotter’s brightly lit basement studio stands an easel where his latest canvass sits. Below is a large bin filled with tubes of oil paint, while scattered on a white futon are dozens of bent and wrinkled photos he’s taken of the area surrounding his cottage. This is where he conceptualizes the landscape he’s going to paint, incorporating elements from one or more photos.

Although half of Rotter’s landscapes are made this way, his vision is only realized once it’s finished. “You can say I Frankenstein them together,” he said of his style. “I don’t need to go far. I love light, and I love lack of light.”

At his cottage in the Kawartha Lakes region and in his home studio in downtown Toronto is where the Scarborough native documents Ontario’s beautiful scenery on canvass. This dichotomy is not obvious looking at his paintings: A young urban dweller who exclusively paints landscapes and has no interest in painting anything city-oriented.  

The recent move to the basement from the main floor of his house was, in his words, to spare his wife and new baby from the paint fumes – and to avoid distraction. Leaning on the basement walls are empty canvasses awaiting his attention, including a partially painted one he lost interest in and abandoned in 1990. He won’t dispose of it because he thinks he just might get back to it one day, while the paintings he outright doesn’t like find a home at his mother’s house.

“I still haven’t mastered oils yet so I still got to keep working on it,” Rotter humbly admits. “And I just like the feeling of them. I like how they’re not dry the next day. In a way they’re messy, but in a way they’re not messy.”  

For admirers of his work, Rotter believes it’s a subconscious familiarity with the scenery that grabs their interest. “I think people are drawn to my work because of the sensitivity of it. I think they like the way I design it,” said the realist painter. I think they know it’s not fake and it comes from a place.”

Rotter was just 12-years old when people began to take notice of his talent. His summers were spent at art camp in Bancroft, Ontario where his teachers recognized the quality of his work.

“They wanted you to draw the scenery. I was really good at it and the teachers were impressed and wanted to see more. I stuck out. I always did it [landscapes] after that,” Rotter muses. “I used to do them for Christmas presents.”

While the photos he takes allow him to sketch out his subjects, Rotter uses his iPad to keep the images organized and to narrow in on the details.

“It actually helps me make it simple instead of guessing and actually overworking,” Rotter explains. “Seeing more detail actually makes me do less detail – it’s nice. It’s a weird thing my head does. I don’t have to fake it.”

In his current piece, inspired by the work of Jackson Pollack, lines he calls “spaghetti” are spread in different directions. But he sees similar design elements in other artists’ work, like Gustav Klimt, that guide his hand. “He influences me a lot. He was the same way; he didn’t have to go far–right out of his backyard–to get inspiration. I take what I see around me,” Rotter explains. “The Group of Seven is always an inspiration, too.”

One can draw parallels between Rotter and the Group of Seven. He is part of the artist collective City Field North Shore–a group of friends he occasionally exhibits with and who serve as support for one another. Rotter fulfills the North, while Stewart Jones (City), David Grieve (Field), Joe Sampson (Shore) complete the group.

“Being fulltime artists is kind of lonely, so we need to have a network, but we don’t need to be in the same room together,” Rotter said, pausing. “You just get lonely.” The group all paint individually but speak regularly to break the solitude and keep each other motivated. Rotter also regularly visits galleries to recharge after a show. “I kinda need to be alone,” he said.

After studying design at the Ontario College of Art and Design and computer animation at Sheraton College, Rotter worked as an illustrator for the award-winning preschool TV program Hoobs, which was created and produced by The Jim Henson Company between 2000 and 2002. “It was the best. They still play the crap out of it,” Rotter said excitedly.

Since then he’s been a dedicated artist, working six-hour days­–painting winter landscapes in the summer, and fall and summer landscapes in the winter. “I think what it is with my work is, I still have that illustrator mentally in my head of everything has to be organized so I design everything. I think it’s subconscious,” he muses. “There are certain things that I have to organize and that’s the obsessive compulsive part of me. Everything has to be in threes. I like three.”

He points to the trees on his canvass, ones he obsessively counts to ensure they aren’t even in number. As he’s describing his technique, the painting doesn’t look so abstract anymore but carries a sense of design and structure.

Although he’s been painting for most of his life, he never loses passion for painting landscapes. “I would be doing this even if I had a fulltime job; I’d be doing it at night,” he said passionately. “And I’d be working so hard, that I’d want to quit my fulltime job. That’s the way it’s always gonna be with me, it’s never gonna change. I’ll keep doing landscapes until they’re irresistible.“

 

The land of peaceful coexistence

Sculptor Florence Chik-Lau uses animal subjects to express her message

By Lina Nijmeh

In the last decade, Prince Edward County is where sculptor Florence Chik-Lau has found the inspiration for her work. Her surroundings, including the animals that inhabit the space beyond her backyard, serve as subjects for her clay sculptures, which carry a deeper meaning than what they first seem to convey.

Each sculpture begins with a message, which is then delivered through the grouping or expression of the animals.

“I try to create different characters–do different things than just the animal themselves,” Chik-Lau explains. “The shape is the animal but the sentiment is very human.”

The universal message carried in all her pieces is one of peaceful coexistence. Each of her anthropomorphized subjects, carry a general impression of the breakdown of communication between individuals, which is something Chik-Lau wants to draw attention to. Her sculpture of two rabbits standing back to back is representative of this breakdown.

In the ‘Utopia’ series, she joins different species and positions them in various ways leaving it to individual interpretation.

“Just through the gesture, the expression on the face of the animal, it conveys a message– it’s a very subtle message and people get different things from it,” Chik-Lau explains. “Everybody who liked my work always told me that each piece–each animal has a different expression and it’s whatever you take away from it.”

Before moving to rural Ontario with her husband and two children, Chik-Lau studied graphic design at the Ontario College of Art (OCAD) and worked as a graphic designer in Toronto for several years. Born in Hong Kong, she admits her exposure to art was limited save for painting lessons she fondly recalls taking with the full support of her parents. But she always knew she wanted to be an artist and art school is what drew her to Canada.

Chik-Lau bashfully laughs as she admits she wasn’t very good at the standard method of shaping clay on a wheel,” but became inspired by animal sculptures. “The first piece I did of the animals worked out well and people started asking me to buy it,” the self-taught potter says.

Working in her small home-studio, Chik-Lau takes an unconventional approach to sculpting, which allows her sculptures to remain unique. Each piece begins as a 22 by 22-inch slab of clay, which she pounds it into a flat piece before shaping it and adding features using photo references. Once the clay is dry, she brushes the details with ceramic stain before it gets fired for its final step.

“My technique is slightly unusual. I don’t do what people normally do with a block of clay,” Chik-Lau says. “All my animals are hollow inside.”

Chik-Lau is a very positive person despite the darkness underpinning some of the uplifting messages she wants to convey. All her sculptures are optimistic and she surrounds herself with the same positivity in her workspace, where a print of Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ hangs.

“There is only one piece I have done, even though the message is kind of sad [of] three different animals–the rhinoceros, elephant, and polar bear [because they] all are endangered.”

Once piece which represents her work well is ‘Bear, dear, fox’ – an idyllic scene of Canadian forest animals, stacked one on top of the other. “The bear is a Celtic symbol for the animal goddess, Artio–she’s a Celtic goddess of the animals and she usually takes the form of a bear,” Chik-Lau explains. “So the bear being very protective of all the other forest animals.”

Protection is an underlying theme that also appears in the many mother and child pieces she attributes to her years working full-time raising her children.

Along with her general sculptures, Chik-Lau also creates masks, ornaments and jewellery of the same nature. Without the use of molds and because the clay is soft and collapsible, Chik-Lau admits not every piece comes together given the process.

“Because of the method I use is really organic, sometimes it happens right away, sometimes it’s a struggle to get it going,” Chik-Lau says. “Even after eleven years and hundreds of animals, I never could tell whether this is going to work or not, and then you keep working on it and suddenly, it happens.”

Chik-Lau‘s work is in many private collections across Canada, the United States, Europe, and Australia.

Thanks to everyone who helped make the 20th Annual Autumn Art Sale an outstanding success. Our 50 artists and sculptors sold over $147,000 worth of art, raising over $50,000 for volunteer initiatives.

Browse our pages to find out more about the McMichael Volunteer Committee, our programs and initiatives, and how you can become involved.

Over 200 Artists & Sculptors applied to be a part of this year’s Volunteer run Art Sale, and it’s gratifying to see how many talented individuals there are out there. Our jury had the unbelievably difficult task of selecting the cream of the crop, and these are the successful applicants. Thanks to all those who applied, and congratulations to those who made it in.

Congratulations to this year’s top artists. Peter Rotter was Best in Show (for the second year in a row), Florence Chik-Lau was our Top Sculptor, and our Top Ten group included Mike Smalley, Jeremy Browne, Tim Packer (Best in Show 2007/2008), Deborah Gibson, Janet Bailey, Lorne Winters, Doris Pontieri (Best in Show 2006), Stephen Yau, and Jamie MacLean.

 

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