There’s a new show coming to Cove Commons. Between August 15 and September 17, island artists Bill Hoopes and Andrea Klann present, Beyond Dreams.
The opening reception will be at TheGallery@CoveCommons Saturday, August 18 from 6 to 8 p.m.
Since the two artists approach the theme from different perspectives, the gallery submitted a profile of each artist and their work.
Bill Hoopes
Bill Hoopes was born in 1951 in Germany and grew up in the United States and Europe. He immigrated to Canada in 1981 and currently lives and works on Bowen Island.
Bill has served as an art instructor for over 40 years to students at all levels.
In his current exhibition, Bill presents a retrospective collection of paintings that employs the use of symbolic and metaphoric images to express his ideas about the world in which we live.
Many of Bill’s paintings reflect his personal perspective on family and parenthood in the midst of current social events and the earth’s precarious ecological and political climate.
Some of Bill’s works depict the peaceful co-existence that can occur between humans and nature, while others emphasize the more imminent consequences of our failure to recognize our contribution to environmental and social imbalance.
Bill suggests that as we examine our role as both users and guardians of this planet, we can begin to accept our responsibility for maintaining and preserving our environment and our relationship with each other.
Andrea Klann
In 2006, Andrea Klann, her partner, her daughter and two cats barged a Port Moody bungalow to Bowen Island, along with Andrea’s dream of becoming a professional painter. One month after moving here, she began painting in earnest, amid building debris and power outages. As the house took shape, so too did her painting as she mined her imagination.
Andrea’s first solo exhibition, In the Spirit of Allusion, was held at The Gallery at Artisan Square in 2008. Andrea has since honed her creativity and skills among the supportive community of Bowen Island as an artist, writer and instructor; represented for eight years by Tartooful Gallery and now Kurbatoff Gallery (South Granville), her work is collected worldwide. Dreams can come true.
Andrea’s paintings in oil explore the intersection of realism and the imagined. Like ‘Girl in Mask’ - an invented portrait in oil - the work is charged by a passion to express emotion through the invented figure. She savours the challenge as an artist to ‘play God’ and paint from imagination. Whether real or imagined, Andrea strives to create paintings that evoke an emotional response, often confronting the viewer. To enhance this response, her figures often inhabit a flat, theatrical perspective much like the stage. Her paintings weave a sense of mystery and oddness that she attributes to H.W. Beecher: “Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.”
To balance the isolation of long days in her studio, Andrea began leading arts integration and creativity workshops in schools and as ProD for teachers in 2010. These workshops transformed into her Cultivating Creativity workshops and last year she joined the Emily Carr University faculty, where she developed and leads drawing/painting in the junior art intensive program.
Originally from the North Shore, Andrea lived in both London and Melbourne during her early publishing career. Bowen Island was the first small community she’s lived in and its artists, dreamers and rocky shores are home. Beyond Dreams is her first exhibition on Bowen since 2010.
