Burn site beauty

Have you ever seen a charcoal painting? Ken van Rees has captured the marks of Saskatchewan burn sites on canvas. The paintings are on exhibit at the Shurniak Gallery in Assiniboia, south of the forest that inspired the series. These canvases have been the work of the last fifteen years.

In 2010, van Rees was a professor of forest soils at the University of Saskatchewan. His research plots in northern Saskatchewan’s jack pine forests burned in a wildfire, along with all his equipment. As van Rees walked through the scorched forest, he noticed something: his light-coloured pants were picking up strange patterns of charcoal markings. It intrigued him.

Experiments, accidental and not

At that point, van Rees had already spent six years bringing art into forests as part of class field trips. He was ready to follow his curiosity. “I brought some of my science into it, trying to do these special experiments to look at how charcoal comes off of wood onto canvas by removing the elements or not removing the elements, like rain and snow and heat.”

From the moment of a forest’s burn until up to four years later, van Rees can harvest charcoal marks. It’s a stage of the forest’s life that we don’t often witness.

“No one goes camping in a burnt forest,” van Rees muses. “Most people avoid burnt forests because they are unwelcoming places and a reminder of death and dying, but fire is an essential part of maintaining the boreal forest. It’s not until you spend time in these black and dreary places that you can appreciate the changes occurring in this ecosystem.” As he returns repeatedly to the burn site, he watches the forest grow back. Wolves and bears wander by his paintings and watch him, too.

Van Rees works from April to October. He places burnt logs on canvas and the natural elements – wind, snow, rain – act over time to “print” the charcoal onto the canvas. He’s learnt that snow reacts differently with charcoal than rain, and snow mould marks the canvas, too. Each tree makes a different charcoal and a unique mark.

Completed pieces are preserved with a fixative spray (on paper) or varnish spray (on canvas), but even so, pieces that have been gathering marks for five months in a forest might not remain stable – and van Rees isn’t sure how that will go over with collectors. The art itself, just like the process of making it, is unpredictable and surprising: “I never know what will happen,” van Rees says.

He covers some canvases and others he leaves open to the elements, creating an accidental experiment: “I could see in my artwork that wind was a huge factor in moving particles around in the forest. And so, my art, even though it wasn’t designed experimentally, showed me something about science which I really hadn’t thought about at all.”

A passion for boreal landscapes

Van Rees, a soil scientist, says his freedom to experiment in art comes from science: “We don’t tell scientists that [they’re] creative. But really, there’s a lot of creativity in science that we don’t give scientists credit for.”

“I personally think a lot of what we do in university has separated art and science and it’s too bad for the students,” notes van Rees.

Van Rees’ first encounter with art was an accident. “I didn’t even know what the primary colors were, if you can believe that. And I had never really been to an art gallery. I was a science guy.” But when van Rees’ mom convinced him to accompany her to the McMichael Art Gallery, something clicked.

“I was standing looking at this large landscape painting [by the Group of Seven]. My [new] class was going to be called ‘Soils and Boreal Landscapes.’ And I thought, why couldn’t my students do this in the class, paint a landscape? And my next reaction was, well, you can’t because you don’t know anything about art. And so, I had this conundrum.”

His sister-in-law, a high school art teacher in Orangeville, told him to start with oil pastels. “And that’s exactly what I did. I said, ‘Here’s some paper. Draw something that’s important to you in the landscape.’ And after that class, I realized that the students loved it.”

By the end of a week of painting forests, van Rees noticed his students having “an emotional attachment” to the forest and soils “rather than a scientific attachment.” They had an energy which “we have lost to some degree in our universities, in terms of being passionate about something and really trying to understand what’s going on . . . allowing students to have an opportunity to be creative, to play.” Art led to discussions on the importance of relationships and risk-taking, “how we learn is by stepping out of our comfort zone. And I was just trying to hammer that point home to the students, that is what art does too.”

Remembering that initial spark – the connection in his own life between art and science – van Rees explains, “When two very different disciplines collide, these bright lights go off.”

Bone pigments

The same year that van Rees’ charcoal-swatched gear got him dreaming up a new series of art, liturgical artist Symeon van Donkelaar was on his way to Saskatchewan from Ontario to help pull off another dream project: a graduate course that placed ten Masters of Fine Arts students and ten soil science Masters students in the same class for a week at Emma Lake Kenderdine Campus in northern Saskatchewan. It was a more intense version of the forest field trips van Rees was already carrying out with his classes: “and boy, the dynamics were really, really interesting. In the morning, we made pigments from bone, or soils. And in the afternoon, we would go into different ecosystems and paint. It was really neat to see the synergy that happened by the end of the week.”

Kenderdine’s campus was launched in 1935 by famous Saskatchewan painters and so, throughout the week, artists would come over to discuss the students’ artwork: “this intergenerational thing was happening. This science-art thing was happening because the artists would be asking, where did you go today? What soils were you looking at? What kinds of things were you investigating? It created wonderful, wonderful discussion.”

‘Beauty from ashes’

Now, van Rees is retired from teaching and expanding his art practice. With the Saskatchewan plein air group Men Who Paint, he joined scientists from the University of Saskatchewan to create a virtual gallery depicting the scientists’ water research. The group has painted all over Canada, including at the Ivvavik National Park. Currently, he has opened his own solo exhibition. “I firmly believe now that every one of us has some creative thing inside of us,” said van Rees. “We just have to figure out what that is.”