Artist Barbara Langmaid has always had a respect for the sea.
She grew up in “earthquake-prone California, with real fears and evidence of past tidal waves.” She was surrounded by beach culture, surfing and near drowning. She migrated up to Powell River in 1983.
During her 40 years of painting she has traversed the gamut of subject and genre. Langmaid was a student at San Francisco Academy of Art and received her bachelor of fine arts in painting and drawing from California State University. A summer residency at Banff Centre for Fine Arts and ongoing painting workshops have all been a part of her education in “mucking about with paints.”
When the tsunamis hit Thailand and Sri Lanka in 2005 then Japan 2011, Langmaid felt a need to document devastation.
“I sensed a scratchy pecking at an idea and a wrestling with what it is I’m pulled toward in my painting—the tangible and ragged evidence of decay, death and disaster; a tangling of bodies and grief and mess and colour and texture and in that place also an intensified awareness of life and beauty and richness that is inexplicable, compelling and strange,” she said.
She has a love of literature and over the years has been reading Dante’s Divine Comedy, theology and apocalyptic narratives. When the tsunami events occurred she could not stop looking at the images. “I couldn’t quite believe how quickly and efficiently a village turned into a potpourri of colour and sticks and a rubble of colour and texture. I was drawn and repelled by what remained.”
Langmaid then started looking around at burn piles in the backyard, the landfill south of town, all grist for the mill. “I’m interested in the unanswerables, the ambiguities and odd spaces that make no sense but hold mystery,” she described. “It’s not the end of the world we’re worried about. It’s the end of civilization, and, to put a finer point on it, the end of humanity. What would that look like?”
Debris Fields will be on show from Wednesday, May 6, to Tuesday, June 2 at Malaspina Art Society’s exhibition space, in the lobby of Vancouver Island University Powell River campus. A reception will be held from 7 to 9 pm on Thursday, May 7, when readers will have the chance to meet the artist while viewing her work.
