Ben Walmsley: Colour Charts 2

Opening reception: Thursday, October 16, 6-8pm

Ben Walmsley’s recent work continues his exploration of Canadian landscape painting. Initially inspired during the pandemic to create smaller-scale works at home with materials at hand, he replicated some of the small oil sketches of Tom Thomson, learning Thomson’s colour sense and impasto paint handling. The resulting Polychrome series juxtaposed each of the Thomson iterations with an array of colour swatches sampled from the painting. 

As suggested in the exhibition title, the mixed media paintings presented within Colour Charts 2 mark an evolution of this series. The new paintings operate in a similar way materially and compositionally, but in this case, the imagery is uniquely Walmsley’s. Here, he paints the places that he knows most intimately, from his birthplace in Prince Edward County to his family farm in the Trent Hills. 

Each small landscape is accompanied by a corresponding colour chart derived from the painting’s palette. The colour chart functions as an expression of the landscape imagery in different terms. Each extracted colour-bar is, in itself, an abstract painting based on the representational painting to which it is joined, analyzing and distilling the imagery into its most pure and simple form. It is this correlation that is the true subject of these works - they are paintings about painting, where the warmth of familiar landscapes meets the studied coolness of Walmsley’s analytical approach.