By Community Affairs

When Muse Meets Inspiration

May 2, 2011 | 8:30 AM

By: Karen Cay
One never knows when, where or how artistic muse is going to strike. When it comes – for an artist of any genre – it is a most blessed event. When the muse turns its back on you – it is a trying time filled with self – examination, angst and a serious concern that the muse has been offended forever and will never, ever come back. That is rarely the case. Instead, sometimes muse’s – like their people – just need a little inspiration.

The paintings currently in the Mann Art Gallery’s show BORDERLANDS – IMAGINING THE IMMATERIAL, represent the best muse has to offer – enough so, to spark my own creativity, allowing me to write a column after several weeks of nothingness.

This is a show of large, lush paintings by once local artist Shawn Serfas, which embrace the core ideals of artistry – of merging imagination and perspective – with tools of the trade: paint, canvas, brushes.

“How do the material imagination and the immaterial relate? How and what do we think about material-based objects and observable life versus immaterial ideas, beliefs and non-physical phenomena? The material imagination refers to the way we imagine and think about material structures. What information do the natural and urban environments reveal about the immaterial structures within any given physical space? These are the questions being asked,” reflects Serfas in his artist’s statement.

Serfas originally intended a career in Environmental Sciences – indicating an early love of the environment. By 1996, though, he was taking first year painting and drawing classes from local professor, George Glenn. So, a loving union between the environment and painting was created in the imagination of the young Serfas.

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Having been a long-term student of Glenn – I can tell you that his courses are challenging and a little gruelling. He is a professor who is unyielding in his intention that students leave his class knowing how to use the rules of painting – how to use their paint and their brushes and their canvass to express … to communicate something significant to the world.

This, along with the influence of noted painters Janet Werner and Charles Ringness from the University of Saskatchewan and Phil Darrah of the University of Alberta – has created an artist strong in his trade.

The influence of his time in Environmental Sciences, though, has proven to be of great benefit as well.

The painting could, at first glance, seem completely abstract.

In fact, they are landscapes looked at from a different perspective (aerial) with an artists’ imagination. He is able to express his concerns for and love of the environment – through visual arts.

“As a creating culture, we construct sites of varying degrees of semi-permanence and the natural process of entropy and degradation slowly reclaims these sites. This process of mark making history is what is at the core of this work. We change landscapes to meet our desires, we create places or foundations to inhabit and build pathways through our environments, which eventually become reordered or reclaimed to its previous or next state. This entire process of building with material and the consequent erosion of that site only leave the memory of time concerning that space,” he says.