Fiona Ackerman

VAG - Art Auction 2012

2012-01-28T22:13:00.000-08:00

< CA + BD
Acrylic and oil paint on canvas, 14" x 24"

I'm honoured to be a part of the VAG's art auction which last year raised nearly $1.2 million in support of exhibitions and educational programs.

Thanks to Doug MacLean of Canadian Art Gallery for his comments to the Art Dealers Association of Canada.

2011-07-13T18:35:00.000-07:00

"Herringer Kiss Gallery on 11th Avenue brought to town the explosive and experimental paintings of Fiona Ackerman in an exhibition titled “Celebratory Gunfire”. Fiona fits right in with what I call "new school abstraction", for she’s one of the young painters that we can see blooming from coast to coast. It’s exciting work that somehow makes you want to laugh- an odd reaction for a serious pursuit, and triggered by marks, colour, and literal explosions right in front of you."

"XO" Acrylic on canvas, 36" x 132", 2011

Luftveränderung - Berlin

2011-07-08T05:30:00.000-07:00

Summertime in Berlin. A breath of fresh air. Opportunity buds, and I wonder if it isn't time for a new beginning.

The Block Magazine

2011-06-18T22:10:00.000-07:00

The Cheaper Show Series: Fiona Ackerman

June 17th, 2011

MARGINAL SPACE, Acrylic and spray paint on canvas. 49" x 63", 2010

In anticipation of this year’s Cheaper Show – a buzzy, decade-old art show highlighting emerging artists and selling their work for $200 a pop – we’re profiling a trifecta of young artists whose work we love. Our first profile in this series is Fiona Ackerman.

Vancouver-based Ackerman’s kaleidoscopic abstracts have us hooked; her landscapes, rich fantasy worlds with unusual colour combos and forays into graffiti, promise to rival even the pristine mountain view from our window. She spills about meeting her art-star dad for the first time, how she makes the choice between army green and, say, neon pink, and drawing inspiration from within.

The Block: How did you become an artist?

Fiona Ackerman: I grew up in Montreal and was always drawing, but when I was 13 I met my father for the first time. He’s a well-known German painter, and I went to a workshop he did in Italy, just a two week painting class, and my eyes were completely blown open. It was the most interesting, fascinating thing I’ve ever seen and I went back the next year. I ended up studying painting and drawing at Concordia, graduated from Emily Carr in 2002, and really never looked back.

TB: When did you know you could make it as an artist?

FA: I am always waiting for that moment! Some months it’s my career and other months it’s my passion – if you know what I mean. Painting is part of my life forever, and everything else in my life organizes itself around it.

TB: What do you do in those times when art is your passion?

FA: For the last five years I’ve worked at Pigeon Park Savings Union in the Downtown Eastside. It’s a bank for people who don’t have bank accounts or often even anywhere to live.

TB: Does your artwork have any social activist influence as a result?

FA: I don’t think so. My work has always been, though not intentionally, very much about painting and about finding my own language as a painter. For me it is a place where I explore my curiosity about painting, about form, and composition, and colour.

I LOVE YOU, Acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 48" x 48", 2010

TB: So where do you find inspiration and subject matter?

FA: Because i have a range, stylistically, the answer is two-part. I have this very abstract work that is driven by colour and by taking little snippets of textures and patterns from daily life that I may not even realize I’m taking in. It’s painting for painting’s sake and building up these imaginary words, very abstractly. Then I have another arena of painting that’s more representational. I’ve done a series of portraits and they are truly about the subject and about representing people I’m interested in and places I find interesting.

TB: Was your painting always abstract or did you start out a realist?

FA: I actually started off more abstractly, but a lot of it happens very simultaneously. Right now I’m working on a body of fairly abstract work at the same time as a series of portraits, so I have these two things happening at the studio. Working back and forth with these two ways of painting, I find that they feed each other. It’s sort of like, as a muscle builder (not that I am one!) you don’t want to exercise so that you lean too far in one direction – I’m exercising both sides of my painting brain in order to be able to wander through both worlds with comfort.

DISTRACTION, Acrylic on canvas, 40" x 30", 2010

TB: Some of your colour combinations are very unexpected; how do you choose colours?

FA: A few years ago, I was deliberately trying to use colours that are very difficult for myself. It’s funny because now they’re colours I can reach for quite easily. When I start painting with these colours, with a palette of odd greens, for example, then it’s really the paining itself that tells me what it needs, the painting chooses for me.

TB: You like to use spray paint, and unusual medium for a fine-art painter.

FA: Sometimes when I’m feeling restless with paintings, I’ll go to the art store and find materials that I haven’t used before to see if it’ll make a different mark or add a different element to a painting. Spray paint is a really powerful tool, but I have a limited colour selection. The colours cause you to work around them a little bit which is an interesting challenge.

TB: How do you choose titles for paintings (some of our favourites are “Washed Up On Soda Beach” and “A Philosophical Maybe”)?

FA: I’ll stumble upon a line in a book and think, oh that’ll make a pretty title and jot it down. Oftentimes it’s after a painting is finished and I have a show coming up and Untitled 1, 2, 3 is becoming far too confusing. It’s really the fun part; it’s like putting icing on a cake, naming a painting.

XO, Acrylic and spray paint on canvas 132" x 36", 2010

TB: You were once quoted as saying: “I’ll never be a landscape painter.” And yet, here you are painting beautiful – if abstract – landscapes.

FA: I should never have said that. That was the first line of a talk I gave at Dianne Farris and I go on to talk about how foolish that is and how I didn’t understand landscape painting – or even painting – at the time, when I was 19 and living in Montreal. I thought I didn’t want to just do more landscape paintings, but I didn’t understand that landscape painting means so many different things and it’s such a basic human thing to represent our environment. Now I’m absolutely a landscape painter, I adore it. My paintings are abstract but they are abstract landscapes, they are environments.

TB: Do you discover these landscapes in the world?

FA: They come from my imagination. I create imaginary worlds. I’ll find a new material or colour and the landscape builds itself up from there, often without me being conscious of it. When you open your mouth to speak, and a voice comes out, it’s not clear why you use that voice; it’s not always intentional

TB: What do you hope to convey with your artwork?

FA: Precision, playfulness, mood. I want to create something that never gets tired. Someone I know who owns a piece of mine tells me they see something different in it every year that they own it. That, to me, is a successful painting.

MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY/ PORTRAIT OF RALPH ACKERMAN SR., Oil on canvas 72" x 36", 2010

TB: Are you painting something special for the Cheaper Show?

FA: I paint with the Cheaper Show in mind but not in a committed way. For a couple months leading up to it I think, this could be a possibility or this could, and then only in the last weeks do I really narrow it down.

TB: Can you give us a hint about what you might be planning?

FA: Over the years I’ve done a series of framed abstract works on paper. These have been a way for me to get to the root of new ideas, which I really enjoy doing. I decided to do a few bigger ones this year, and there’s a chance that those that will be strong enough for the show.

TB: What do you think the Cheaper Show means for Vancouver’s art scene?

FA: Publicity, obviously, for an artist is always so much appreciated, and buzz – people are so excited about so many things, and painting is often a media that is harder to get excited about because it’s such a personal experience. The event itself is fun in a way that artists don’t get to experience as often, but also I think all these artists are getting a closer look.

TB: An artist friend sometimes complains that the Cheaper Show means everyone waits for this one day to buy art at a discount. What’s your opinion?

FA: I’ve thought a lot about this too. I think buying one piece of artwork, if it’s someone’s first piece, is a real foot in the door. If a person thinks they could never own artwork and we can break that feeling down for them with such a great price, we’re really opening the door for a life of owning art.

Interview Darcy Smith

Herringer Kiss Gallery

2011-05-14T15:13:00.000-07:00

Celebratory Gunfire
May 14 - June 11, 2011
Herringer Kiss Gallery, Calgary AB

Picture Book One

2011-04-24T21:47:00.000-07:00

Vancouver, BC - The Storyboard Label is pleased to announce the launch of the Picture Book Art Series at the Interurban Gallery. Picture Book One is a group exhibition featuring painting, illustration and sculpture by emerging and established Canadian artists including: Fiona Ackerman, Karin Bubas, Jessica Delorme, Ryan Heshka, Steve Hubert, Jeffry Lee, Niall McClelland, Nadia Moss, Luc Paradis, Corrilynn Tetz, and Howie Tsui.

The exhibition is curated by Scott Lewis and is on view until May 5.

Lululemon Lab Art Instillation

2011-04-07T15:30:00.000-07:00

I was invited to create this instillation piece in the display window of the Lululemon Lab in Vancouver. My piece is third in an artist series curated by Zoe Pawlak, and it will remain in the window until the end of April. This was such a pleasure!!

Proxart Magazine feature

2011-03-23T15:45:00.001-07:00

Proxart Magazine - Spring 2011

Art Toronto 2010

2010-11-07T22:48:00.000-08:00

This was the inaugural year for both Parts Gallery an myself at Toronto's International art fair Art Toronto 2010. An exciting trip, and a wonderful weekend in Toronto.

Galleries West reviews Pushing The Edge

2010-10-23T21:59:00.000-07:00

Painting is a well-mapped terrain; we have reached an era where it seems as if everything within the medium has been done, from all styles of representation to abstraction and back again. In this climate, painters strive to create their own visual languages. Pushing the Edge, the title of a three-person painting exhibition at the Diane Farris Gallery, suggests that the works of Fiona Ackerman, Nick Lepard and Wil Murray take painting into unexplored territories. Delving into the work and the artists’ intentions however, I found that they were enamoured with the structures of painting, namely portraiture and landscape, using these as a means to create paintings that are less about representation and more about the manipulation of paint while remaining within its boundaries. (read more)

Globe and Mail

2010-10-13T12:56:00.000-07:00

REVIEW: Arts writer R.M. Vaughan reviews the exhibition at Parts Gallery in the Saturday October 9 2010 full colour edition of the Globe & Mail.

Fiona Ackerman at Parts Gallery
Until Oct. 10, 1150 Queen St. E., Toronto; www.partsgallery.ca

Vancouver-based painter Fiona Ackerman’s new acrylics on canvas, currently on display at Parts Gallery, are an excellent example of what psychologists call “associational logic.”

When you describe the individual parts of a given Ackerman painting, then add said parts together, the math ought not to hold. But her paintings do cohere, and cohere wonderfully, largely because they remain true to their own interior, wholly idiosyncratic, systems of logic. Ackerman is a brave painter – always walking the dental-floss-thin tightrope between expertly composed and total train wreck.

In one painting alone, I found half loops and dendrites, sharp barbershop stripes and splayed, wobbly brush strokes, speckles against scales and flame licks paired with waves – and nothing seemed out of place. Ackerman’s mad colour combinations, cement greys sidling up to neons, tangerines making nice with paper-bag browns, would cause sensible colour theorists to throw up their twiggy arms in high dismay. But Ackerman makes the odd couples dance, mostly by knowing exactly how much ballroom floor space to give them.

It takes a lot of careful planning to make a painting come across as both superficially haphazard and, on further inspection, deeply studied. I suspect Ackerman scrapes off as much paint as she applies. One of her key strategies, I’m guessing, is to compose each painting around a central organic form, or cluster of forms, and then build out from that point.

The result of all this careful planning is, perversely, a set of paintings that carry the loose, shifting and untrustworthy physics of free-association daydreaming. The works also remind me, weirdly enough, of the interiors of aquariums, those microcosmic seascapes made up of luridly coloured, hyper-artificial coral and flora.

Pity the paintings are not waterproof.

Forging the Land

2010-09-20T09:48:00.000-07:00

Commotion by the Ocean, Acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 36" x 72" 2010

This September marks the 10 year anniversary of my moving to Vancouver. I moved from Montreal just into my 20’s. A Montreal-er to the core, I was following love and opportunity to a city I knew very little about. Already absorbed by painting, I was fueled by the energy of my urban environment and the community of Montreal artists around me. I was afraid, that the move to green and rainy Vancouver would somehow make me soft. To friends, I promised I would be back. Secretly to myself however, I made what I thought were far more important vows. I swore I would never become a landscape painter.

What a mistake that would have been. I have since come to appreciate landscape painting for it’s history, it’s versatility and it’s potential. I employ the idea of landscape not in the traditional sense, representing our natural surroundings, but rather as a composition referring to and inspired by the many environments we experience.

Landscape is a powerful compositional tool, bring the eye out of disorientation to land on a horizon. So describes my painting process. I begin very loosely, building up the canvas with a conversation of marks, colours and line. Like walking through a labyrinth, I am searching to find my way through the world I am depicting by moving paint around, overprinting and exploring. There is a transformative moment in the process of making a painting when a metaphorical horizon emerges. Suddenly the painting has direction and the mess of colours and shapes begin to function in relation to one and other.

It is these relationships, between colours and form, land to sky, that express the complexities of our experience. It is in so many landscapes that out stories unfold, and our lives are staged.

2010-09-05T22:37:00.000-07:00

Pushing the Edge

I'll be showing some of my newest work along side Wil Murray and Nick Lepard. I'll also be giving an artist talk at DFG on the 18th.

Artist Reception: Thursday, September 9, 6 - 8pm
Exhibition continues to October 2
Artist Talk: Saturday, September 18, 2pm

DIANE FARRIS GALLERY - VANCOUVER

Image: The Original Analog Sound Wave, Acrylic on canvas, 36" x 72", 2010

Diane Farris Gallery
1590 W. 7th Avenue
Vancouver, Canada
(604) 737-2629
art@dianefarrisgallery.com

Oeno Gallery

2010-09-01T21:12:00.000-07:00

"Hunt the Dog", oil on canvas, 75" x75", 2007

The kids are back in the County. This painting, "Hunt the Dog" is based on an old photograph taken of my aunt and uncle when they were kids, on the farm where they grew up in Prince Edward County (ON). Next year will mark the 100th anniversary of the Ackerman farm, a beautiful piece of land where generations of children, including myself, spend endless summer days running free.

Under the watchful eyes of a series family dogs, we played and explored the countryside- returning home when the sun set. Independent and on the edge of danger, the outdoors was our home. It was the site of our socialization. Loyalty, betrayal, sympathy, trust all played out in each growing season by a clan of kids, bent on mischief.

This week the painting came home to the County. I am very pleased that it now hangs (with a number of other pieces) at the Oeno Gallery.

Cheaper Show #9

2010-06-27T20:52:00.000-07:00

Zoe Pawlak, Seamus Dixon and I at Cheaper Show #9 preview night. 200 artists, 400 pieces of art, $200 each.
In good company.

www.thecheapershow.com

Rover Art Fair

2010-04-30T23:54:00.000-07:00

Here are some shots of the opening night of the first Rover Art Fair, a 3 day salon to celebrate art and promote roverarts.com.
April 16-17-18, 2010

U8 at Sopa Fine Art in Kelowna, BC

2010-03-26T22:22:00.000-07:00

PRESS RELEASE

SOPA FINE ARTS
GALLERY HOURS:

Tues – Sat 11– 5 Sun – 12 – 4
T. 250.763.5088

Sopa announces our 5th annual juried exhibition, the ‘U8’ Event. Beginning April 1st (opening night) the gallery will be exhibiting over 350 original art works priced Under Eight Hundred dollars.

The goal of this event is two fold: to promote appreciation of original art to the public by making it affordable; and to promote the exceptional work of many local artists, as well as introduce artwork from selected international artists. This show features a wide range of mediums, from over 80 talented artists. It's also become a great opportunity for the gallery to discover new artists as well!

This once a year Affordable Art Exhibition is one of the largest of its kind in Canada with over 100 artists works on display. Artists and collectors alike have helped spread the word, and popularity has turned ‘U8’ into the most unique opportunity for buying original artwork in one space. Sopa Fine Arts is located in Kelowna's popular South Pandosy Shopping District.

This show only runs for a total of 10 days each year, so be sure to stop by early to select your artwork!

April 1st (opening night)
Show opens April 2 – 12th

For more information please contact the gallery or online at www.sopafinearts.com

A Clean, Well Lighted Place

2010-03-26T21:09:00.000-07:00

I'm very happy to now have my work at the Herringer Kiss Gallery in Calgary. This is home for now to my first painting of 2010, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place".

" It was very late and everyone had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light..." (Ernest Hemingway)

Collaborative painting with Zoe Pawlak at our show CLEARLY SEEN at On the Rise in Vancouver

2010-02-16T16:46:00.000-08:00

For the month of February Zoe Pawlak and I have the On the Rise Gallery on South Granville. Though its nice to spend some time wearing high heals, we decided to get our hands dirty and painted a new piece together, in front of the gallery over the span of a few chilly afternoons.

Collaborating with someone on a painting for the first time is a delicate experience. It's sort of like having a conversation with someone who's name you forget. You feel you know the other person's painting so well, yet you just can't find your way in. Sometimes it ends badly, or at least awkwardly and others it finally clicks and you wish you could start back at the beginning. This time it clicked. Sure, the painting itself is no masterpiece, but I now look at Zoe's painting totally differently. The experience was not the tentative "do you mind if I" that collaborative work often is. It opened a real conversation about painting. And we're anxious to start all over again with what we've learned.

Honorable mention, Kingston Prize

2009-10-13T19:38:00.000-07:00

Distraction
Acrylic on Canvas
30" x 40"
2009

My painting Distraction received an honorable mention award of $1000 for the Kingston Prize. It is a portrait of my husband, my son and my painting.

Painting as a vocation is something that runs deeply through the core of my family relationships. I came to know my father as a teenager. A German painter himself, he had always been completely dedicated to his art, with family life often an unfortunate casualty. Meeting him was the beginning of a complete reformation of my own identity. More than just gaining a paternal history, I found the roots of my own creative drive.

Over several summers, he taught me not only to paint but how to be a painter, how to fine-tune a craft and build a career. But to follow his example would mean being a man ambitiously devoted to his art. Here I am at 31, not a man with ambition, but a woman with a baby – and still a painter.

This painting is a portrait of my husband and son sitting beneath one of my paintings. Titled Distraction, is about the delicate place painting holds in my family relationships now. As I look at my young family sitting for me to paint them, supporting my desire to paint, tolerating my desire to paint, I think about the example set by my father. I wonder if I can be wife, mother and painter. Will I succeed in dividing my devotion? Can I live it all fully, despite the distraction?

Kingston Prize Finalist

2009-07-08T10:32:00.000-07:00

2009 Finalists announced for

Canada's National Portrait Competition

I am very pleased to have my painting chosen as a finalist for the Kingston Prize. The finalists were chosen from 471 entries by the jury consisting of Professor Robert Enright, art critic and writer, from the University of Guelph; Eliza Griffiths, painter and Assistant Professor at Concordia University in Montreal; and Dr Lilly Koltun, Director-General of the Portrait Gallery of Canada.

The portraits will be exhibited at the Grand Theatre in Kingston, Ontario, from October 9 - 25 2009. After its Kingston showing the exhibition will embark on a national tour lasting several months, heading to Wolfville, Nova Scotia; Toronto; and Calgary.

After a Montreal Rain

2009-07-05T22:24:00.000-07:00

It is HOT in the studio.
By 3 pm I worry that the sun is burning a hole through the ceiling. Then I go outside and feel just a bit of ocean breeze and think this is pretty much perfect. I think back to the many suffocating summers in Montreal and wonder how I managed, and if I could handle that kind of heat now that I've been in Vancouver so long and have become kind of... soft. Then I panic and decide not to test the idea any time soon.

But there are those Montreal summer evenings when the heat and humidity explode into a huge rain storm. Bare feet rush out into the streets and the whole city takes a deep breath. The rain sizzles on the streets like poring water on a hot frying pan. After the rain, the gardens come alive again, and the city finally sleeps.

This Painting is called Rooftop Eden

The Title Piece

2009-05-16T22:12:00.000-07:00

The title piece for the exhibition, this one is about stepping out of my comfort zone to experiment with untried colours and explore different ways of painting. The escapade refers to my creative adventure. I use the word harlequin here not only as the adjective ‘varied in colour and having pattern of irregular shapes’, but to evoke the nimble acrobat from the Commedia dell’arte tradition, and the importance of improvisation. Incidentally, an ironic nod to the Harlequin romance novels. Using lush, warm colour, these paintings are for me very seductive.

A Harlequin Escapade

2009-05-14T21:41:00.000-07:00

Paintings by Fiona Ackerman
May 14 - 30 2009

Diane Farris Gallery
1590 W. 7th Avenue
Vancouver, Canada
V6J 1S2
tel (604) 737-2629

View exhibition at on the DFG website

During the past ten years, I have produced a body of figurative as well as abstract paintings, often combining the two forms. I have been told many of my paintings are quite dark, that even the lightest, most colourful portraits seem ominous or sorrowful. A Harlequin Escapade is a departure conveying joy and playfulness seldom found in my previous work. Why any artist’s work changes is often quite personal, even unexplainable but in this case, change was inspired by a conscious decision which may have had its origins long ago.

Growing up in Montreal, I went to F.A.C.E., an elementary and high school emphasizing the fine arts. Theatre, art and music were part of the core curriculum with the same importance as math and science. I loved music and was very shy. For the first few years I sat among 10 other flutists and safely played as part of a group. As a teenager, I found a burst of courage and asked to switch to the French horn. I practiced like mad to be able to rejoin the group and when I did, I was no longer safe in a wash of whistling flutes. I now sat alone with my strange, awkward and loud new instrument, fully exposed.

This was a big step outside of my comfort zone. The instrument itself is a cumbersome mess of awkward metal tubing. Becoming proficient enough to hold my own in the band meant learning how to turn a challenge into something quite beautiful. As I was no longer sitting among the flutes but off to the other side with trumpets and tubas, I was able to hear the music from an entirely new perspective. This was a rediscovery of something I’d thought I knew quite well.

I mention all of this because these paintings are in a way my new French horn. Over the past decade, I have developed a certain style, established a palette of colours that seem to work within the safety zone of experience. These new paintings represent a conscious challenge to face the unfamiliar. I made a decision to reach for colours that I would normally have shied away from. Standing over a blank canvas or an unfinished painting at the studio, I would often ask myself “what wouldn’t I normally do now?” – then do it. As with learning the French horn, I sought out what I would previously have considered too loud or awkward, and tried to tame or craft it into a satisfying composition. By changing my approach, changing perspective, I was able to rediscover painting.

This conscious exercise in being bold not only expanded the visual vocabulary I now work from, but as importantly, it was fun! I think some of the joy of this experience comes through in these bright and playful paintings; I hope the warmth may carry through to my next work.