Local French-Canadian artist Stéphanie Prest essentially put the rest of her artistic life on hold for two years to make the art that eventually made up her exhibit Big Sky. Between when she started the work for the exhibit and now, Prest has been through multiple chapters of her life. Things have changed; she’s processed what’s happened and she’s grown. But professionally, Big Sky was her main focus.
Whether it’s moving studios, coping with the pandemic, or dealing with intense personal changes, each image on display carries a story behind it, a story that only Prest and close family and friends know about, which is just how she likes it.
“People who see them, they don’t know,” she says. “They don’t know what’s behind each painting, so I think there’s safety in that.”
Prest moved studios a lot during the making of the art in Big Sky, which was stressful, she says. But the pandemic allowed her to take her time with each piece in a way that she normally may not have been able to. For example, she was able to take extra time with her painting “McMorran Beach.”
“I fixed it, and I was so much happier with it,” she says about “McMorran Beach.” “I was scared that I would hate that painting, and that I wouldn’t want to show it, and that it would be my least favourite.”
Prest says that sharing art that’s a really poignant part of her life is only possible because she’s in a new chapter now.
“Knowing that, it’s almost like it’s not a part of my present, it’s a part of my past, and so I think that it’s easier to show,” she says.
Prest has always enjoyed working on large-scale paintings that come from her photographs. As we’re talking, she’s sitting on Dallas Road, a landscape she’s painted countless times; as anyone who has been there knows, the sky is prominent in that setting.
“I’m obsessed with water,” she says. “My inspiration comes from the ocean, and I love water, but I was putting a lot of water in my paintings… I wanted to focus on how much the sky changes around here and how beautiful they all can be, and the different moods that each sky creates.”
Prest hadn’t done too much work with clouds prior to this exhibit; in Big Sky, they are a main focus. She wanted to experiment with the different moods clouds create, and it wasn’t easy.
“They’re really hard to do because there’s nothing grounded in them. They’re airy. I work very much in light and shadow, and so, they’re not like that,” she says. “It took a while to figure out, and I worked it through on several of the paintings. I’m not even sure I figured it out by any means, but it’s quite difficult because of all of the levels. It keeps going background, foreground, background, foreground. They’re really quite difficult. I found it extremely challenging. And I like that. I liked that I challenged myself. I didn’t want to just paint the same seascape that I had been painting for 10 years.”
Prest loves painting large scale because of the realism involved in it, she says. Smaller paintings don’t have the same impact.
“I’ve always painted life-size,” she says. “I obviously can’t paint the sky and the ocean life-size, but I feel like the bigger it is, the more it feels like the scope of what it feels like to stand at Dallas Road.”
Big Sky
Until Monday, June 28
Fortune Gallery
fortunegallery.ca