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Exhibition part reunion for artist

An artistic homecoming was held this week for Kelowna painter Erica Hawkes. The mood was part reunion, part admiration as people milled about Groop Gallery among more than 50 of her paintings.
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An artistic homecoming was held this week for Kelowna painter Erica Hawkes.

The mood was part reunion, part admiration as people milled about Groop Gallery among more than 50 of her paintings. Few in her hometown had seen even one of her paintings before, until this prodigal daughter returned with a shipment of them for her debut exhibition.

It opened on Thursday night with a reception followed by a matinee open house on Friday.

Hawkes has been painting since childhood, and left Prince George at the age of 20 for art and design school in Denver. She started a family, moved to the Okanagan, and eked out a slow, steady stream of art in between all the activities of parenting and life.

Eventually her body of work and developing skills reached the professional grade. Tutt Street Gallery in Kelowna was the first to invite her to hang paintings on their wall. She is also one of the featured artists at Lloyd Gallery in Penticton and is in the preliminary stages of relations with a gallery in Banff.

Groop Gallery took some convincing. Proprietor Melanie Desjarines doesn't let just anybody hang art for sale in her downtown art establishment.

"Initially I was reluctant when she told me she lived in Kelowna as I only carry local artists, but once she explained that she is from Prince George, and then sent me the link to her website, which I viewed while we were on the phone, I became excited about bringing her on as one of my stable artists," Desjardines said. "Her work is very vibrant, colourful, cheerful, well-composed, and attractive to a large audience. I also like that Erica's work is very identifiable. She has developed her own signature as an artist and is doing very well nationally and internationally. As a commercial gallery that has to survive on the sales of artwork, I realize the importance of carrying artists and artwork that have wide appeal. That said, I work very hard to ensure that my entire gallery has a very diverse collection of artists, genre, and price range in order to have something for everyone."

Hawkes fits all those points. Her smaller paintings retail for about $150 while her larger ones maximize at $1,900. There are many in the $600 to $700 range and more in the $1,000 to $1,500 range.

She also has a couple of distinct painting styles. One has rigid geometric lines and textured paint dabs to render the overal image, while the other has swooping lines criss-crossing and painted in to build an image in similar style to a stained glass window.

"I'm so glad my galleries are supportive of my style variations," Hawkes said. "I love landscapes, but I also love painting people. I call that one [the rigid lines] cubist impressionism and I call those ones [stained glass motif] curvism. I'm working on a third style altogether: landscapes with more curves and softer lines."

Each one of these styles requires different sets of tools, different arrangements of her small home studio, different materials. She has worked in pencil sketching, water colours, oils, but for practical purposes (small studio, short bursts of time due to parenting duties, etc.) she is currently focused on acrylics on canvass.

"I am still an emerging artist, and I think all of us look to established artists for mentorship and inspiration," Hawkes said. "That's what I want to get to - the master artist level - even more than having my paintings in more galleries. I'm still focused on learning the craft, and I think that is true of a lot of painters. You don't ever want to stop learning. I know it will happen, I just have to put in the time. I know my art will change again when I go back to oils, which is what I really love. I've got a lot to look forward to."

She also has a lot of positive influences to look back on. Her parents are both artists and her twin sister is an artist. An aunt and a grandparent are artists. She took it to the professional level after high school art classes sparked her youthful interests. And that teacher, Maureen Faulkner, came to Groop on Friday to buy a painting and hug the painter.

"She told me that she got the idea for curvism after I taught the class about cubism," Faulkner said. "It just goes to show how, as a teacher, you just never know how the things you say will affect one student or another. I might have talked about cubism with 6,000 students and maybe only Erica ever processed it like that, and look what she's done with that."

The show will be on display until mid-September, and Desjardines will have select Hawkes paintings available ongoing.