Patrons who walked into the Humboldt and District Gallery on Thursday night, July 17, for a talk by two Saskatoon artists were met with a striking, monochromatic set of mural sized landscapes on the walls, drawing the eyes in all directions. The exhibition “natura vindicat” or nature reclaims, is the result of an eight month plus residency at the Saskatoon Forestry Farm and Zoo, where artist collaborators Cristine Andrew Stuckel and Diana Roelens studied the environment. Amid a network of manicured lawns and pristine floral displays, the artists turned their attention to the reckless and chaotic world of the bordering scrub near ponds and water bodies. The images they captured could as easily have been the banks of Wolverine Creek as an urban habitat.
Andrew Stuckel and Roelens unveiled their process, their growth as collaborative artists, and the start of their working partnership during their talk.
“We met at the University of Saskatchewan,” Diana Roelens recalled, “We were both in the BFA program and it was 2015. We met in a painting class, and when I walked in, I thought I was the oldest student there. Then I looked across the room and I thought, ‘Oh, thank goodness, there's another mature student’.”
Part of their course requirement was to team up with another student to paint each other's portraits, so Andrew Stuckel and Roelens started off as class partners in that project. The work relationships spun over into class breaks, coffee conversations, and a friendship that evolved into an artistic partnership.
After the completion of their classes, the duo continued into the years of pandemic restrictions.
“With the Covid restrictions we were isolated back into our homes,” Roelens explained. “When we could join into small groups, So Christine and I became a group in our own pod as such and that's how we started to just work.”
By swapping sheets, meeting over Zoom, and getting together where and when they could, the informal collaboration continued, almost like an exquisite corpse exercise. Cristine says that the two were exposed to a variety of Canadian artists in their studies, some of whom were known for collaborative projects that both students admired.
“So that's where we got the idea of giving it a try,” said Andrew Stuckel. “That’s when we started to work at the Forestry Farm as part of a residency program. We worked with big panels, and we wanted to divide up the papers so that we were always drawing into each other's work. So, it's not like I was just going to do a whole section, and she would do a whole section. We would take a set of two panels that we would work on at the same time, and we would divide it into four. We would draw straws basically to see who starts in the upper left.”
To ensure they were always drawing into each other’s work, they arranged that whoever started in the upper left, the other one would start in the upper right and then they’d switch on the bottom and work opposite sides to maintain the discipline.
“We really had to work to bring our styles together,” Andrew Stuckel admitted. "When we first started working on the papers, we were in our own little area working, and we’d turn around and look at what the other one was doing. It was like, ‘Oh boy, we need to fix this.’ We needed to change how we drew a little bit. I had to loosen up, and Diana probably had to tighten up a little bit, and I always drew way darker at first.”
Like learning how to dance, the give and take process eventually yielded a satisfying equilibrium. After four years of refining their processes, their work melded in a remarkable way, so much so that when the panels were drawn together, there was minimal editing needed to get the work to look like a cohesive piece. In fact, the pair admits that it’s sometimes hard to remember which artist did which sheet or panel in the mural.
Since the production of the work in ‘natura vindicat,’ the artists have branched out into new territory adding colour with bigger washes and less chaotic reproductions. Much of that work will appear in a fall show at the Chapel Gallery in North Battleford.
Their current exhibit is on display at the Humboldt and District Gallery until September 9.