Dana Statham

Painter circumnavigates Vancouver Island

DANA STATHAM has packed a lot into the last year, most of it living—not painting. She’s very early into an artistic career that doesn’t, at this point, feel like one to her. The amount of time she’s been able to devote to her creative endeavours isn’t as much as she’d like, but she also fears making art into something she does to pay the bills. Right now, she makes her living doing something entirely unrelated, but has a designated studio space developing in the home she recently purchased and is renovating with her new husband.

Stylistically, if artists E.J. Hughes and Maud Lewis had a “love child,” it could very well be Statham. An auto-didact like Lewis, she imparts both joy and reverence into her acrylic-on-canvas coastal imagery with the detail, sophistication, and draftsmanship of Hughes. Response to her work has been very positive; she sold out her most recent shows on Hornby Island, where she’s spent a lot of time and which she loves to paint. She’s eager to see how Victorians will receive her work.

"Mystic Beach" by Dana Statham, 24 x 36 inches, acrylic on canvas

I congratulate Statham on her past success; she demurs. “There’s something so unique about Hornby; it’s so many people’s ‘happy place’ and haven—they want any piece of it they can get…to take home with them.” Yet when she was painting arctic scenes during her time in Nunavut, “even that, people related to, and were excited about, so I don’t know...capturing the sense of place is what people love and connect with.”

Dawn Casson, owner of The Gallery at Mattick’s Farm, says it’s more than just the subject matter of Statham’s pieces that her clientele is eagerly queuing for. “I’ve already got people asking if [her pieces] are available for sale before the show.” When she says that they have to wait until the pieces are hung, “They say, ‘I’ll be phoning you at 10am on the 26th, then,’” Casson recounts with a chuckle.

“We’re very excited about her pieces,” Casson continues. “I can’t wait to see what they look like hanging on the walls…it’s just going to be stunning.” She discovered Statham’s work the modern way—on Instragram—and tracked the artist down to see if she’d be interested in having a show there. Statham, whose bike commute to her work at Saanich Peninsula Hospital took her past Mattick’s Farm, says, “I would pop into the gallery, and it was like [Casson] had curated all of my favourite artists into one spot,” so she felt she “would be in good company. I was happy to say yes.”

"San Josef Bay" by Dana Statham, 36 x 24 inches, acrylic on canvas

While Casson would have loved to create a solo show for Statham, this past year of life, work, moving, renovations and marriage all meant just seven pieces to display. To create a full show, Casson has partnered Statham with painter Wendy Oppelt, a veteran of the gallery whose loose, lively, “macro-impressionist” painting style serves as a foil to Statham’s meticulous, graphic compositions.

Statham says of her seven paintings, “I plotted them all on a map,” and they ended up being a “circumnavigation of Vancouver Island…from the very north end at Cape Scott Park, to the Lochside Trail, Mystic Beach, Tofino…it happened to work out that it was a coastal exploration.” In the past, she would paint from imagination, but now works with photographs “to get the subtleties right.” While she knows people will likely be familiar with the vistas, she does take “a heavy dose of artistic license to tweak a composition…I try not to get too tied to a photo; it takes the fun out of it.”

Paintings by Dana Statham and Wendy Oppelt, The Gallery at Mattick’s Farm, March 26-April 22, Monday-Saturday 10am-5:30pm, Sundays 11am-5pm. Opening reception April 14. 1-4pm. 109-5325 Cordova Bay Rd, 250-658-8333 or thegalleryatmatticksfarm.com.

Mollie Kaye is Focus Magazine's arts editor.