Trapped at home by the pandemic, Karen Kulyk missed her beloved Italy so much that she decided to travel there through paint.

Physically, she was at her easel in her Dartmouth home; imaginatively, she was in Italy where she had spent close to 10 years hiking in the country’s northern and central areas in both spring and fall.

Painting “brought me back to a kind of peace,” says the cheerful, prolific artist, who transfers her high spirits into the compressed energy of her art.

Kulyk’s vivid, joyful paintings in oil, gouache or chalk pastel are on view now in Il Giardino Italiano at Secord Gallery, 6301 Quinpool Rd., Halifax, with an opening reception Friday, Sept. 12, 6 p.m., and artist talk, Saturday, Sept.13, 1 p.m.

Kulyk has captured the formal tailored shapes and multiple greens of Italian garden design with her own distinctive use of high colour to unite composition and engage the viewer.

“I want you to feel the same way I did about discovering an exciting place so often I enhance the colour and put other things in as if it was my garden.”

She switched a house wall to pink to contrast with cooling navy blues of open windows and doorways; she celebrated a tree she loved by painting it in small planes of brown and purple.

Kulyk loves the colour green – “Well, it is the middle of the spectrum. It is such a powerful colour.” In fact, her kitchen is full of greens – bright green handles on cool green cupboards, a pale green lamp hanging over her dining table, a simple arrangement of a green plastic kitchen chair next to a blazing green bowl.

These intense and kinetic paintings have all types of greens but also a huge variety of other colour: reds and oranges in burning bushes, pinks and whites in lively potted flowers, the hot yellows of lemons in bowls or shanging on branches, moody nostalgic blues in shadowy evening views and, of course, a lot of robust, earthy terracotta in roof tiles and all sorts of planters.

“Colour has always driven me. Initially I worked with an Impressionist palette. Now I use everything. I’ve included earthy colours and black and greys and whites.” (There is one black and white sketch in this exhibit which demonstrates the force and descriptive power of her line.)

As the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, Kulyk grew up in a culture that celebrates colour in ribbons, clothing, embroidery and ceramics.

When she was a student in fine arts at York University, her professors were American draft dodgers escaping the Vietnam war. “It was very exciting but no one taught us how to paint. We never had an anatomy lesson. When I left I couldn’t afford to paint in acrylic on canvas so I used watercolour and I taught myself.”

She first painted a simple collection of seashells floating on white space then started adding tables, flowers and gardens. Travel became key to her imagery.

Kulyk has explored and sketched in France, England, Spain, Thailand, Hong Kong, Bermuda, Mexico, Cuba and Venezuela. Until Italy “I thought France was my thing.”

Now she loves Italy. “It’s the colour and sophistication. I love the words, I love the way they speak with their hands, I love the design and clothing; you can buy salt shakers that are spectacular and yet they’re simple.”

Simplicity is also key to Italian garden design. “Italian gardens are sculpted and not just a riot of colour. They are designed to be like a huge house with chambers you’d go into. They are a place people would go to be released from the intense heat of the Italian summer, the crowding, and settle themselves into a more relaxed environment.”

These ordered, manicured and symmetrical gardens have their roots in ancient Roman villas with a design perfected in the Renaissance. In the first hundred years of the Common Era, author and lawyer Pliny the Younger loved to spend time with the trimmed hedges and sculpted boxwoods of his garden at his Tuscan estate.

The public and private gardens Kulyk toured in Italy ranged from a botanical garden attached to a hotel in Elba to elaborately ordered, private villa spaces of yew and cypress trees with brick work, ponds and sculptures to a bounty of plant-filled clay pots in front of a house at the end of an alley. “They can hardly get out their front door for all their pots.”

Kulyk, now 75, is as enthusiastic and driven as ever about making art. “I want to get as good as I can ever get. I’ve been working really hard and concentrating on how I paint.”

At this stage of her life she uses the best materials, her favourite Williamsburg paints and British chalk pastels. She counts off her decades in terms of media: watercolours in her 20s, watercolour and gouache in her 30s, chalk pastel in her late 30s and 40s, then oils. “Oil opened up a whole new spectrum and I love to mix colours. Oil I find it living, it’s really rich.” She finds acrylic paint flat.

She is reading Mary Gabriel’s fascinating book, Ninth Street Women, about five American, female, abstract artists including Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan and Joan Mitchell, whose work she loves.

Like them she uses colour expressively and plays with shape and colour, particularly in semi-abstracted skies full of movement and emotion in different blues and whites.

Kulyk’s work has been widely collected and exhibited internationally including in solo shows at the National Gallery of Thailand, Art Gallery of Ontario (touring exhibition), University of Toronto (New College), Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Chicago International Art Exhibition, Festival Canada ( Hong Kong), Marianne Friedland Gallery in Ontario and in Halifax at Page and Strange and Studio 21.

In 1983 Karen was awarded the Gold Medal for watercolour painting in the Prestigious Treviso International Art Competition in Italy. She is also the official artist for Stony Ridge Cellars.

While shot full of details and energy in line, colour and sculptural forms, these paintings are as calming and beautiful as the gardens are intended to be. The sensations of hot and cold can be felt on the skin.

Il Giardino Italiano is on to Sept. 26; the works may also be viewed online: https://www.secordgallery.com/art/index.php?/category/325

(Note: Karen Kulyk’s sister Janice Kulyk Keefer is a well-known Canadian writer and I stole her phrase “compressed energy” from an essay she wrote on her sister’s art for the book Karen Kulyk: A Vision of Tuscany because it’s such an accurate description.)

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Tags: Art, artist, exhibitions, painting