Who: Guennadi Kalinine

What: Icons

Where: St. James Anglican Church, 137 Melville St., Dundas

 

Guennadi Kalinine is an old-fashioned kind of guy — when he paints icons. And that’s as it should be.

Icons are holy pictures, icon being a Greek word for image or picture. Icon painters, past and present, respect tradition. Kalinine’s Christmas icon — one of two dozen of his modern icons on show at St. James Anglican Church in Dundas — is a wonderful example of how a contemporary icon owes its inspiration to earlier Russian ones.

Those Russian icons, in turn, preserved artistic traditions of the Byzantine Empire, which thrived between the 4th and 15th centuries.

One of those traditions was that Christianity’s most joyful event has sorrow at its heart: one was expected to think about Christ’s death in contemplating scenes of his birth, or Nativity.

Kalinine’s Christmas icon recalls a 600-year-old icon made in Russia, now in Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery.

Kalinine, a native of Russia, places his large and elegantly elongated Virgin Mary in the centre to indicate her importance. As a mediator between the worshipper and Christ, she is always the most prominent figure in Byzantine and Russian Christmas scenes.

Haloed and veiled, Mary reclines on a red bed near the mouth of a cave. Christ, swaddled and haloed, lies above and behind her inside the cave. A brown ox and a white donkey look on. Blue rays of divine light shine on Christ from a golden sky.

All the other characters are arranged around Mary in six small groups in a landscape of flat-topped hills and bits of vegetation.

Kalinine places four angels at the top. Three stand on the left witnessing the event. The one on the right, slightly bowed with one hand out in a speaking gesture, announces the event to a young shepherd with two black sheep.

An older, bearded shepherd, clad in shaggy fleece, stands below. He’s watching a veiled midwife preparing to bathe Christ. According to legend, the older shepherd, on hearing the news of Christ’s birth, ran off immediately to be the first to see him.

Christ, seated in the midwife’s lap, glances toward a circular bath into which the second midwife, with her Sunday-best knotted veil, pours water from a jug.

In the left corner, Joseph, bearded and bowed, is approached by a shepherd. Above Joseph, three Magi on horseback are shown en route.

The differences between Kalinine’s icon and the earlier Russian icon are minor. In the earlier icon, there are six angels instead of four. The groups have the same figures in them, but they are in different places around Mary.

Mary’s joy at Christ’s birth is balanced by her foreknowledge of his suffering and death. The viewer is made aware of this knowledge through a variety of details and gestures.

Mary, for instance, turns away from the child in the cave. She might be supervising the bathing — a very maternal thing to do. But with her hand on her chin, she looks lost in thought. This gesture also happens to be an ancient mourning gesture. Joseph assumes a similar attitude, as if to reinforce Mary’s sorrow.

The cave, the place of birth, is a place of burial. Christ’s rectangular bed resembles a manger, but it also looks like an altar, a reminder of his sacrificial death.

Christ, the swaddled baby, is reminiscent of the dead Christ wrapped in winding sheets. And the midwives about to wash the baby serve as reminders of female mourners washing Christ’s body.

Joy and sorrow are inextricably linked.

Regina Haggo is teaching Best Foot Forward, an art history course focusing on the human figure from prehistory to the 20th century. You can sign up for Monday or Friday afternoons. Classes start on Jan. 3 and Jan. 7. To register, phone the Dundas Valley School of Art,

Who: E. Robert Ross and Guennadi Kalinine

Where: McMaster Gallery, 63 Main St., Dundas

 

An extraordinary event is taking place in Dundas. It’s an exhibition of new paintings by E. Robert Ross, Hamilton’s most popular landscape artist.

He’s the guy who painted the mural of Sherman Falls in the lobby of St. Joseph’s Hospital. Other public places around the city have large Ross paintings, but his smaller works are usually sold so quickly that it’s almost impossible to see more than a couple of his recent paintings in one place.

But special circumstances this year led him to accept an invitation to show at the McMaster Gallery. Ross has been painting up a storm, and the result is almost 30 gorgeous landscapes hanging salon-style on the gallery walls.

A full-time artist for 35 years and a passionate environmentalist, Ross has a strong commitment to the land.

“Nature is beautiful,” he says, “and we are part of it.” When we study it, we can learn about ourselves as well as about the natural world. That’s his artistic credo.

Ross is known for his local landscapes, such as Cootes Paradise and the Dundas Valley, but images of northern Ontario also pop up in his repertoire. And in this exhibition he has included a few views of Newfoundland, which he visited this year.

He captures nature in all her multifarious splendour, under various skies, at different times of day and night.

And while Ross’s style is lifelike, it is also strikingly simplified. What looks from a couple of metres away like a near-photographic view dissolves into marks and brush strokes up close.

A rosy early morning sky dominates The Island at Dawn. Three dark evergreens, one taller than the others, take centre stage, trying to compete visually with the sky. The narrow strip of water reflects the stillness of the land. Mist rises from the land and the lake, making us feel we are present at a moment in time that is transitory and fragile.

But Ross works his magic and transcends the lifelike, making us aware that we are also looking at a carefully composed painting.

This he does, for instance, by creating three horizontals, each with its own distinctive shapes, colours and patterns.

For Cliffs, Rock Lake, Algonquin Park, Ross takes a more dramatic approach and draws attention to nature’s power.

Sheer cliffs rise out of the water in the foreground and take up most of the composition. A few trees struggle out of crevices and cling to the rock face, creating a textural contrast between the bare smoothness of the stone and their ragged green growth.

Farther right, the evergreens take over. A white cloud, its upper edge echoing the treetops, is partly hidden by the cliffs and vegetation.

Ross is sharing the gallery space with Guennadi Kalinine, a co-owner of the McMaster Gallery.

Like Ross, Kalinine is a landscape painter. Working in a soft-edged style, he likes to explore the subtle effects of different kinds of light and atmosphere.

He was a finalist in a competition sponsored this year by International Artist magazine, which devotes eight pages to his work in the current issue.

In this exhibition, Kalinine is showing mostly limited edition reproductions of some of his best loved pieces. He has also published a book illustrating his landscapes and what he calls his fantasy paintings, which combine landscape with stylized figures. The book, Forlorn Path, is available at McMaster Gallery.

Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art.