Stephen Hutchings’ Theatre of Trees is an overwhelming visual poem, a spiritual self-portrait, and a summation of nearly a half-century of artmaking. Its scale, centered around a massive 40-foot-long canvas of a single fallen tree, is intended to evoke the vastness of feeling and time. The variety of surfaces—drawn and erased passages overlaid with coloured transparent varnishes of various densities—suggest the fleetingness of memory. The work expresses the gap between the finite duration of a human life and the unimaginable immensity of eternity. Hutchings’ tree depicts the external world as the embodiment of an inner landscape, the emotional terrain that constitutes a soul, imagined as a shimmering and ephemeral work of art.
Exhibition curated and organized by the Marion McCain Institute for Atlantic Canadian Art.
This exhibition is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and Arts NB
