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In a walk around Nathan Bartley’s studio space in downtown Nelson one has a feeling they just walked in on the middle of something.
Looking around at the 12-foot-high walls, covered with south-facing windows on one side, are raw canvasses plastered with the etchings and markings of an idea trying to sprout.
You see a theme arising in many of the odd-sized pieces, an allowance by the etcher for a proper gestation period and a hint of what is to come.
Not that Nelson painter Nathan Bartley is trying to be evasive, mercurial or enigmatic, he is wholly engaged in and respective of the ideas springing forth from inside of him, knowing he must realize them on the outside in due course.
On Tuesday evening (7-10 p.m.), Bartley will be hosting a studio opening at 917b Edgewood St. to divulge many of those works that are embodying the thoughts breaking forth from him.
“This is the story of modernism and mysticism in an allegorical and symbolic fashion, not in a philosophic fashion,” he said. “We’re going from the outside in and we’re coming from the inside out and this includes mystical ideas from India.”
All of the new drawings people can see on Tuesday are in preparation of Bartley’s show with Graham Gilmour at Touchstones Nelson in 2011. Although many of the current works in his studio may not be able to keep up with the growth of his style when the show is held next year, the opening will be a chance to sample a new movement in the art world.
“These paintings are about thinking, and I’m sort of, in a Marshall McLuhan way, talking about the exteriorization of bodily systems, bio-mimicry,” he said.
Bartley proposes that people have a tendency to exteriorize themselves, creating aspects of themselves in the material world and then dwelling in them.
In a two-pronged attack on the intellect, he shows that we are no different than our environment, that it’s an extension of ourselves.
His conclusions arose after he undertaking an odyssey that started with graduation from the University of Guelph in 1995 with an honours degree in fine art, to a 600-year-old Buddhist temple in Japan, to having his ideas of himself crushed by the Dali Lama in India and on to an ancient monastery in the Himalayas.
A near death experience landed him in the Yukon where he studied something outside of the Buddhist tradition with a First Nations Déne elder. Coupled with a sojourn in Taiwan and another stay in India as part of a spiritual quest, he found some purpose for creating art.
It was there he learned the basic structure of who we are, and how to completely deconstruct the mind and the thinking process.
“Then, at 30, I had decided that I had lived enough and done enough that it was time to start my art career,” he said.
A one-year stop in Vancouver soon deposited him in Nelson eight years ago.
You can check out more of Nathan Bartley’s work online at www.nathanbartley.com.
