3 Painters, 3 Visions, at Secord Gallery, 6301 Quinpool Rd., Halifax, through Oct. 27, is a tranquil journey in classic realism during a time of international stress.
In valuing everyday objects from flowers to power poles, painters Susan Paterson, Kim Milan and Greg Coldwell point to order, the thoughtful distillation of experience and feeling and the importance of taking time to look and appreciate the world immediately around you.
Both award-winning Dartmouth realist Susan Paterson and Kim Milan, a Saint John-born, Halifax artist new to the gallery, paint flowers in oils as a precious form of still life. Paterson harks back to the Old Masters in her technically exquisite oil paintings of peonies, in bloom and bud, at their most dramatic on a black background. Her painting of a Public Gardens fountain in soft, subdued greens is timeless.
Paterson also exhibits her masterful, award-winning still lifes of antique silver dishes, patterned lace cloth and other white objects, like near translucent silver dollar plants. The quality of detail – tiny silver balls, inscribed scrolling – and her technical skill with paint are amazing.
She paints herself reflected in her silver objects which adds a different layer of time. In seeing the artist in the act of painting the tense becomes present; however, the beloved, ancestral silver belongs to the past. Once celebrated as valuable and key to family and communal celebrations, it now ends up on thrift store shelves.
Milan – also a figurative painter – exhibits small, engaging portraits of a “birthday” carnation in a glass of water. She has a lovely use of light and sculpts her flowers and female figures out of paint in a way that is vital and fluid. You can feel her moving her brush to quickly realize and depict what she sees until it is just present without overworking it.
“Whatever my subject,” she says in her artist’s statement, “I enjoy painting quickly and energetically. I am captivated by strong passages of light and finding nuances in the shadows.”
Her shadows are deep and moody in Summer’s End, a painting of chalky blues and dark tones of a seated swimmer’s back, and in the peaches resting at the base of a vase of hydrangeas in Late Summer Arrangement.
Milan’s carnations, depicted in blurs of pink as well as a more precise geometry, are connected to her daughter, who asked to have pink and white carnations at her 15th birthday party. Milan loves carnations and they are the flower of her birth month, January.
The small, sweet, silver-framed carnation paintings are completely attached to family; the glass jars come from a bottle dump behind the old miner’s house she and her family bought in Malagash. The painting, Petit Pot Carnation, contains an empty “Petit Pot” yogurt jar, which was her daughter’s favourite yogurt.
Milan loves painting flowers because their structure allows for endless shadows and a play between light and dark.
“Additionally, I find flowers very much like people. When they are placed together in an arrangement they seem to have a dialogue amongst themselves. Flowers have heads that one can imagine as lifting toward the sun, nodding shyly or tilting into a conversation. I painted, Dance Class, the ballerina piece, to demonstrate how carnations very much resemble ballerinas to me.”
Milan is influenced by Cezanne, Corot and J.W. Morrice as well as the mid-20th century Bay Area Figurative Movement, whose artists broke with abstract expressionism.
Greg Coldwell’s small, urban paintings are inspired by a daily exercise that has value to him – walking around the city and looking up. He paints small, precise works of power and telephone poles, focussing on their detailed tops of insulators and kinetic wire.
His work is more akin to Christopher Pratt in its architectural subject and crisp clean lines, though his painting of pure cloud in a dazzling bright blue is mix of crisp and soft and puffy and has a spiritual content. He also paints old motel signs and construction equipment posed in a lovely, faded orange sky
Coldwell learned landscape painting as a child from his father, who worked as an artist and model maker at the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History. He was also inspired by the museum’s artists including Azor Vienneau and George Halverson. Coldwell worked in architectural modelling and designed and built props for the film industry in Vancouver and Toronto. He has also built models and dioramas for Canada’s museums and written a graphic novel about the HMCS Haida for Parks Canada.
His favourite artists include Herge, Moebuis, Van Gogh, Joe Johnson, Ralph McQuarrie and Jack Kirby.
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NS reviews 
Hi Elissa, Just a quick thank you. For all the reviews over the years, for all the thoughtful sensitive observations, the honest reactions. You’ve stayed true to the arts and to the Nova Scotia art scene in particular. I love reading what you write.
That’s all. Just thank you, Anna
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Thanks so much Anna!
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