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Erica Rutherford's latest paintings have been collected in a new solo exhibition at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, representing the past three years of the artist's output. Those few years are only the tip of the Rutherford iceberg, though; she's been painting for fifty-plus years over the course of a lifetime spanning several continents, several professions and countless artistic achievements.
Rutherford says she was "always" painting, though this pursuit was secondary to her theatrical and cinematic work in earlier decades; her most memorable film project was the African musical Jim Goes to Jo'Burg, which she produced with the encouragement of Orson Welles; she conceived it as a film aimed at and starring black Africans, adventurous and exciting without being "hideously violent." It enjoyed popular acclaim in limited release at the time and has developed a following in critical circles.
Painting proved her most enduring vocation, though, and she began pursuing it "seriously" at age thirty-five. After various stints as an artist and a teacher in England, Spain, South America and the United States, Rutherford visited Prince Edward Island on the advice of a friend and found it "enchanting." She eventually retired here to pursue her art full-time, sharing a home with her close friend Gail Rutherford. Erica says it's been easier to establish herself in relative comfort on PEI than it might have been elsewhere, given the artistic opportunities and relatively low cost of living. "People think we're millionaires," she jokes, "but [our life here] was built over a long period of time."
Island life hasn't been all quiet comfort for Erica, though; she established the Printmakers Council of PEI workshop in Charlottetown, eventually abandoning her administrative role in that group to concentrate on her own work and let some younger folk get involved. The workshop now produces "printmaking worthy of being shown anywhere," she says proudly.
Apart from printmaking and collage, Rutherford's own work has been restricted primarily to painting of late. She has switched from acrylic paints to oil, which she finds "more expressive," and has undergone what she describes as "a very dramatic change in my imagery." Gone are the flatly representational still lifes she once favoured. Rutherford's latest paintings are inscrutable assemblages of weirdly humanoid and animal-like figures engaged in scenes that suggest ritual, arcane rites and myth.
Rutherford insists, however, that her new works aren't representations or reinterpretations of established mythologies. These new paintings are "ideas that I invent," she says, citing Jung's collective unconscious theory to explain how the mythological "feel" of her recent paintings comes from instinctively tapping into archetypal images with potentially universal resonance but no single concrete identity. "I let them flow out of my unconscious mind halfway between dream and fantasy," she concludes.
As for what her paintings mean, Rutherford is tight-lipped about that. "I'm not going to say they aren't personal," she hints cryptically, but that's as far as it goes. She leaves the interpretation of her work to others. How does she come up with her subjects? "I don't know," she confesses, describing the paintings as works that spontaneously grew from unconscious doodling in her sketchbooks. "I'm glad that people say they like my art," she admits, but the challenge for her is to produce works that provoke a different reaction or understanding in each viewer. "Ambiguity is very important."