Connie Van Rijn – “In the Shadows”: an exhibition of paintings
August 4 -28, 2021
Opening reception: Friday, August 6 at 7:30pm depending on Ontario government restrictions
Co-Sponsors: Susan Latremoille and Pamela Gibb-Carsley
About the Artist
Connie van Rijn is a Peterborough based artist who received her MFA in painting and B.Ed in Integrated Arts at York University. She studied Experimental Arts at OCA (now OCADU), ceramics at Sheridan College School of Design and psychiatric nursing at Endegeest Psychiatric Hospital in Oestgeest, Netherlands.
Her work is in private collections in Paris, Amsterdam, New York City, Vancouver and Toronto.
About the Exhibition
My childhood was spent largely out of doors in flood plains and wooded areas adjacent to my home. We lived on the banks of the Credit River and on Fletcher’s Creek. We were on the outskirts of town, surrounded by farmland. My paintings are based on memory of inhabiting those landscapes. The memory is more corporeal than mental and evoke a sense of what it was for me to inhabit these particular spaces.
My show at the AGB is a selection of paintings based on the depictions of past and current landscapes.
“Cry Me a River” “Land of Milk and Honey”
Artist’s Statement
Painting is a form of dialogue between painter and paint, between material and intent, the cerebral and somatic, the ineffable and the concrete, perception and notation. In short, situations that seem to stand in opposition to each other. We structure these oppositions so that we might be revealed to ourselves as beings in the world. I paint to make notation of my being in the world. Notation is a neutral act. Painting is a neutral act. Being is rarely neutral. I seek the space between the known and the unknown to find the place where I can paint without intent. A neutral space where recognition of states of being are recognized and noted.
“Wonder Land” “Wonder Land Redux”
