Some artists wait a lifetime to find that scene that will be their masterpiece.
Daniel Rajala found his when he looked out one of the windows from his apartment on Harvie Avenue. He had a unique view of Willingdon Beach and Townsite at sunset one summer night.
“I started working on the painting last summer and after eight months it was finished,” Rajala explained. “My mother Lily really liked it and my sister and brothers bought it for her 80th birthday in May. The painting captures the peace and serenity I have found in Powell River.”
When he was in junior high school in Campbell River, taking art classes with teacher Bill Abbott, everyone else was doing realism, “which I was not good at.”
Rajala started abstract representational painting and won top art student awards “because my work was different and the teacher loved my use of colours.”
In senior high school he won a Rotary trip to Ottawa named Adventures in Citizenship, because the librarian Anne Haig-Brown liked his art, “again because it was different. Today it is more about being the same and MacDonaldization. It’s about everyone eating at MacDonald’s or going to Tim Horton’s, looking the same and doing the same things,” he said.
In the 1970s, Rajala attended Emily Carr University of Art; back then it was called the Vancouver School of Art. He graduated with a four-year diploma in painting and did a post-graduate year in 1977-1978.
It was not much longer after he finished art school that he started selling paintings in Vancouver. He was sharing a large one-bedroom apartment with a friend on Barclay Street, which was also his studio.
“Before we moved to Toronto in 1980, a friend of my roommate’s bought the painting I did of basketball players dancing together in a night club for $200,” explained Rajala. “It was a lot of money at the time and helped pay for my trip across the United States.”
Rajala didn’t like the fast pace of life in Toronto and moved to Kelowna where he got a job working in a woodworking shop helping adults with developmental delay. Eventually he moved back to Vancouver.
He was one of the founding members of the Gallery Reflections in Gastown and had his first one-man show there in 1983. The owner of the Gandy Dancer nightclub in Vancouver invited Rajala to exhibit his paintings in the club.
“It resulted in a big turnaround in my life, as the club owner subsequently bought three paintings,” he said, adding that he soon acquired a job working for Tamahnous Theatre in Vancouver’s East End.
“A few years later I met a well-known Canadian painter and poet, Bill Bissett, who also bought a few paintings from me which was a great encouragement to keep on painting.”
Rajala became one of the founding members of the Gallery Gachet in 1994 and he displayed his painting of Alexandra Park from when he lived by English Bay, in the opening exhibition. He also served on the board of directors at the Unit Pitt Gallery.
He sold paintings at the Aboriginal Arts Store when it was on Granville Street and Homer Arts on Hastings Street into the early 2000s.
“Times sure have changed since then,” said Rajala. “Now it’s expected that everyone should wear Nike or Adidas runners and products, have the same short hair cut. It’s very hard to find a salon where there’s different hairstyles to choose from.”
He laments that in smaller cities like Powell River every day is the same with fewer and fewer people celebrating Hallowe’en or Christmas, Valentine’s Day or St. Patrick’s Day or Easter anymore. “I carried Hallowe’en into November when I had a painting in the Red and White show at Vancouver Island University last year. I painted my face white and wore red and black.”
Rajala finds that while there is a return to traditional art, there also are factories where landscape paintings are mass-produced by people so they have become commodities instead of works of art.
“Unlike some artists I don’t make much of a living with my art, but whenever I do sell a painting, it sure helps out,” Rajala said.
