Guest curator Russ Mode discusses a prairie landscape by Mac Hone. (Alison Sandstrom/paNOW Staff)

By Alison Sandstrom

Prairie Perspectives

Saskatchewan landscapes on display at P.A. Arts Centre

Jan 23, 2020 | 4:42 PM

Luminous renderings of Saskatchewan landscapes are on display at the John V. Hicks Gallery at the Prince Albert Arts Centre.

The paintings by Mac Hone capture scenes ranging from the white water of Stony Rapids to the rugged hills of the Qu’Appelle Valley. Some of the pieces in the exhibition have never been seen by the public before.

Guest curator Russ Mode said he hopes people come away from the show with an appreciation of the work it took for the artist to capture these natural landscapes.

“To save it for us, and for people that are going to be here 100 years from now,” he told paNOW. “Because when we talk about nature, things change, sometimes very slowly, sometimes very rapidly.”

(Alison Sandstrom/paNOW Staff)

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On Thursday, Mode facilitated a “Lunch and Learn” curator’s talk at the gallery. During the hour-long event, he walked patrons through each of the paintings he had selected for the exhibition.

Mac Hone is primarily known for his abstract art and prints. The fifteen pieces in this show were selected from a massive collection of the artist’s work owned by the Mann Gallery.

Over 2000 pieces by Mac Hone and his wife Beth Hone, an artist known most famously for her ceramic work, were donated to the Mann Gallery by the couple’s children in 2015.

The gallery has spent the nearly five years since, cataloguing the art and reorganizing their vault to store it.

Since fall of the 2018, Mode has been volunteering 20 hours a week, working on the project.

“There’s a massive amount of work that still has to be done with them,” he said. “We’ve got the basic cataloguing, photographing and the lists done, but it’s now to get the descriptions all written so that we know exactly what we have.”

Hone neither dated nor named most of his works, complicating the process. Information on the paintings has been gathered from family and friends, and from Mode’s personal knowledge of Saskatchewan’s geography.

“I can recognize the Qu’Appelle Valley… but knowing where Mac lived and worked certainly helps, in that I’ve travelled through a lot of those areas myself,” Mode said.

“The Landscapes of McGregor Hone” is on until Monday at the John V. Hicks Gallery at the Arts Centre.

(Alison Sandtrom/paNOW Staff)

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alison.sandstrom@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @alisandstrom