Nathalie St-Amant speaks about the wild forests — as really she does of anywhere out-of-doors, from remote bear-travelled beaches to sheep-trimmed meadows at Ruckle — with the vocabulary of someone hopelessly, romantically entwined.
This is no misunderstanding; St-Amant’s upcoming show called Blush is an exploration of that rush of blood she feels simply “being” in natural places. She said that tug from within the heart compels her to literally run to paint en plein air.
And, sometimes, to run away.
Many of the paintings shown in Blush were products of a recent trip to one of those wild places, a remote Clayoquot Sound cabin hemmed in by forest and ocean where she and fellow painter Michael Henry Wright spent 10 days serenaded by crows and visited by bears; it was a place long in her mind from time spent there many years ago.
After two days of weather, the skies opened and St-Amant raced to a place she calls the Cathedral — an endless source, she said, of blushing.
“It’s kind of this big cliff,” said St-Amant. “I went straight to there, because it’s my favourite-ever thing. That place makes me blush so much, makes me ecstatic so much that sometimes I have to run and hide under the blanket to breathe. I’ve had these instances where it was too much, you know; you’ll see that painting at the show.”
St-Amant said she’s always been attracted to the wild places, being completely immersed and as far from humans as possible — and to the contrast with the other places she loves. Those include more pastoral areas like the house at Ruckle Park or the garden and farmland there, which reflects just a different facet of her “passion and love for creation.”
“Nighttime is such a big deal there,” she said. “You’re pretty much swallowed by the guts of the forest, you’re completely engulfed — and you feel very, very small.”
In between bear visits — one memorable ursine mother stole a carton of cashew milk, according to St-Amant, and slurped it noisily nearby — and spontaneous dips in the ocean, Wright and St-Amant painted in that shared environment “like mad colour scientists and passionate fools,” she said.
“He wants to do crazy interpretation, and I’m a little bit more classical,” laughed St-Amant, “but I’m still, you know, expressionistic. We just went at it — there was this magic between us that we started feeling as painter friends.”
The cabin itself — and another nearby, both built by Wright — also turn up in St-Amant’s painting. Many, but not all, of the Blush works were begun there, she said, as she works to finish them on a compressed timeline for the show’s opening.
“It’s like Emily Carr was saying: you’ve got to finish your paintings freshly from the wild,” said St-Amant. “Because you’re still kind of there — still nurturing and receiving that gift that was given. I’m still relishing it — it’s almost like eating little bits to taste it again.”
Blush runs from a 5 to 7 p.m. opening reception on Friday, Aug. 15 through Sept. 3.
Visit saltspringgallery.com for more information.