LOTUS revealed

Lotus in Motion brings focus to water, the beauty of clean water and its importance as part of the natural world. With lightweight paintings that float atop translucent water, the artist has created an artwork in response to nature, in cooperation with nature's beauty.


As water holds the work, Lotus reflects nature's shapes, forms and colors. Wing and leaf, feather and petal, all coalesce in Halloran's vibrant palette.



"A really unique and unforgettable dialogue between man and nature, technology and emotion." - Giorgetto Giugiaro, founder & chairman, Italdesign referring to the artist's monumental installation at the 2006 Olympic Winter Games (www.gordonhalloran.com)

LOTUS at Art Crawl

We're taking part in the Sunshine Coast's 2nd Art Crawl, October 21st-23rd. In Roberts Creek, you can see the colourful installation of Gord Halloran's LOTUS IN MOTION in the garden pond.

Friday night from 7 PM to 9 we welcome all with beverages and socializing -- and a view of Halloran's other permanent artwork from the two Olympic Winter Games - 2006 in Turin and 2010 in Vancouver. Also featured will be a variety of retrospective work - some representational, painterly and provocative. Come meet the artist.

The Art Crawl offers Crawlers access to 108 participating galleries and art studios, representing over 175 artists along the entire Sunshine Coast Highway from Langdale to Lund.

Public art - a million different responses

From the article: "Public art offers a window into our present collective condition. It can be the most direct and free exchange of ideas we have.

"The artist's challenge is to deliver work to the public that engages the broadest possible audience. Work that inspires a million different responses -- all of them true." Gordon Halloran

Photo: Michael Halloran

To see this article online, go to: http://www.theprovince.com/entertainment/GALLERY+Gordon+Halloran+exhibits+work+Lotus+Motion/5219108/story.html
Online photo: Caitlin Hicks

LOTUS In Motion Opens @ VanDusen Botanical Garden

Globe & Mail photographer Darryl Dyck took the above photo on Thursday as Halloran installed the floating paintings. Friday, as the installation opened to the public, the image was chosen as one of the most popular photographs of the day in Canada's national newspaper.

Below the artist installs in Heron Lake.



Photos below: Michael Halloran




See lotusandyou.blogspot.com for pics of the opening party

Floating paintings next project for Ice Gate artist

Lotus in Motion,the Watercolour Project
debuts at VanDusen Botanical Gardens

Sunshine Coast artist Gordon Halloran, who created the wall of ice paintings called Ice Gate for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, will bring another brilliantly coloured outdoor public art installation to the City of Vancouver in July, 2011, called Lotus in Motion, The Watercolour Project.



VanDusen Botanical Garden is the setting for this first-ever floating painting installation, by artist Gordon Halloran. Made up of lightweight works in the shape of the lily pad, bold in colour and varied in size, the work finds inspiration in Claude Monte's impressionist waterlilies, calving icebergs and overlapping organice textures of landscape flora.

Visitors will see the artwork as they walk the paths, touring the gardens. Livingston Lake, Heather Pond and Heron Lake will contain the floating paintings.

Lotus in Motion uses site, scale and colour to attract viewers. Like bees to bright flowers, onlookers are seduced by vibrancy, lured into collective play. Working along the trajectory of his unique, sculptural ice paintings (Paintings Below Zero), Halloran employs water as part of the artwork's physicality. His floating paintings bud from the natural world; each composition, a layering of pattern and hue whose origins proliferate in nature. Wing and leaf, feather and petal, all are employed to coalesce as Lotus. Temperate rainforest, garden forms and pond life, flora and fauna are studied within the brilliant surface of waterlily leaves.

Lotus paintings are made of simple, organic materials: watercolour paper and beeswax and are loosely labeled according to Linnaean taxonomy, a system used to identify plants.

Western culture, eastern spiritual heritage
The floating lotus paintings evoke a cultural heritage that is western and a spiritual heritage that is eastern. Informed by a view that is scientific and an artistic sensibility that marries technical mastery and innovation, the paintings offer a rare perception of the multiple layers of a seemingly singular experience.

City of Vancouver first host to artist's unique work
Vancouver Parks Board was first host to artist's frozen paintings @ Vancouver's West End Community Center in the early nineties. The artist has since produced Paintings Below Zero for 2 Olympic Winter Games, and has created monumental installations in other international cities, his artwork seen by hundreds of thousands of people.

The registered, non-profit group Third Coast International Public Art Society is helping to raise needed funds to defray production costs of the installation. There are two primary ways to support Lotus in Motion, the Watercolour Project. One is by purchasing Lotus art cards. The other is to sponsor a floating painting for a day, a week, a month, or the entire duration of the installation. Go to the blog site (www.lotusandyou.blogspot.com) to get your art card & contribute direclty to offset the hard costs of creating the artwork.

Contact: Caitlin Hicks 1-604-886-3634

Photo credit: Katherine Kortikow

Public art . . what was the artist thinking?

What is it that artists contribute to our experience of life? To our culture? To our sense of purpose and meaning? To the quality of our lives?

Practical things, for sure. If you look around, chances are that almost everything you see has been designed by an artist. The chair you're sitting on, the ring on your finger, the pen in your hand, your keyboard. Everything that moves us forward as a society comes out of the creative process.

Artists explore the world we live in with the expression of their beings. In other culture, they're Shamans, they see things and can't avoid communicating what they see.


Artists make tactile an idea, they give coluor to an insight, shape to an observation. They put in context things intuited. And when their creativity meshes just so with their materials it is without words, sublime. It's not always beautiful, but it's a meditation on life.

With Lotus in Motion, artist Gordon Halloran reflects on nature. in Smile of the Buddha, Hippolyte Taine's short passage juxtaposed with contemplation on Monet's water lilies, resonates:

"Nature is . . . an infinite chain of causes from effects and effects from causes, an infinite progeny into the past and the future of decompositions and recompositions with no beginning and no end."


I'll leave you with that for today.

Benefit for Public Art, June 17, 2011

ON JUNE 17th, we hosted members of our community at a FUNDRAISER FOR PUBLIC ART in Roberts Creek. The artist, Gordon Halloran, created a special preview installation of the floating paintings as part of the evening. We'd love to take this opportunity to wholeheartedly thank those who contributed to this event.

















Our SPONSORS, Judith Reeve, Landscape Architect, The Coast Reporter & IGA Gibsons; VOLUNTEERS Tracy, Jaz Halloran, Nina Haedrich, Shelley Harrison-Rae, Joanne Bennison, Lis Dixon, Donna Schmirler, Erik Olson, Jean Marc Boyd; PROFESSIONALS Dave Halstead and Gibsons Party Rentals, as well as all those who attended, who brought their friends and participated in the evening.






It was wonderful fun; five permanent LOTUS paintings were sold and we raised almost 25% of the expenses of LOTUS IN MOTION at VanDusen Botanical Garden, July - September 2011.



This Sunday, June 26th 2 - 5 PM OPEN HOUSE come out and see the artwork in the garden. Call for location 886-3634

Public art by Gordon Halloran

VanDusen Botanical Garden to host Lotus in Motion



Multi-coloured lotus leaves to float on two lakes, one pond in July

JUNE 6, 2011, Vancouver - Artist Gordon Halloran, who most recently completed a wall of ice paintings called ICE GATE for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, will bring another brilliantly coloured outdoor public art installation to the city of Vancouver in July, 2011 called Lotus In Motion, the Watercolour Project.

VanDusen Botanical Garden is the setting for the two-lake-one-pond installation, made up of multiple paintings in the shape of the lily pad, bold in colour and varied in size. Visitors will see the artwork as they walk the paths, touring the gardens. Livingston Lake, Heather Pond, and Heron Lake will contain the paintings which will float on the water. A smaller installation will also be featured in the pool of the Bentall Garden just inside the Garden Entrance. The installation opens to the public July 29th.

Gordon Halloran’s Lotus In Motion uses site, scale and colour to attract viewers. Like bees to bright flowers, onlookers are seduced by vibrancy, lured out of individual pursuits into collective play.



Working along the trajectory of his unique, sculptural ice paintings, (Paintings Below Zero), Halloran employs water as part of the artwork’s physicality. Floating lily pads in a variety of sizes, Lotus In Motion is an installation of shape and hue that finds inspiration in Claude Monet’s Impressionist waterlilies, calving Arctic icebergs, and overlapping organic textures of landscape flora. Halloran’s lotus paintings bud from the natural world – each composition, a layering of pattern and hue resplendent with vigour.

When the new $20 million Visitor Centre opens at VanDusen in September 2011, Lotus In Motion will provide a backdrop of magnificent colour to the building in the garden setting.



In addition, the artist is creating a new series of Lotus In Motion paintings for a parallel exhibit. While the water installation uses a combination of materials designed to stay afloat and intact in the water as well as to be seen from a distance, the permanent wall paintings are made of slightly different multi-layered materials, rich in texture, lacework, and brilliant colour.

A special press preview on Thursday, July 28th is planned at VanDusen Botanical Garden, with the artist in attendance. For press information on this opening, contact Caitlin Hicks (604)886-3634. Lotus in Motion, the Watercolour Project runs until September 30.

Dragonfly on a lotus leaf

At the BENEFIT FOR PUBLIC ART held at the artist's studio and garden this past weekend, Gord read from a book which has resonated with him called "Smile of the Buddha".



In this book are his favorite artists: Monet, van Gogh, Gauguin, Kandinsky, Brancusi, O'Keefe, Klein, Jasper Johns, Cage. All of them, it turns out, are linked by observation of the present moment.



Claude Monet, painter of stillness and reflection, was one of the first artists to suggest a meditative state of mind with his artwork. With his water garden in Giverny, he joined his meditation on impermanence with the idea of regeneration and renewal; renewal that can be observed in the garden, with the seasons, the birds, insects and plants.



On Thursday, Gord installed the floating paintings in the garden pond, surrounded by yellow and purple iris, red azalea, green and lime lady's mantle, fish, birds, dragonflies. Erik Olson took photos, while volunteers shopped, worked in the kitchen, prepared tapas, designed the programme, cleaned and sorted furniture. Getting ready.



The sun made shadows in the fresh air.



Tomorrow: Friday night by the garden pond. People, paintings.

Making art

BENEFIT for PUBLIC ART

Discoveries of abstraction

Generate. Proliferate. Grow. Without limit, Halloran’s lotus paintings bud from the natural world ­– each composition, a layering of pattern and hue resplendent with vigour. By gesture and action, through pattern and structure, the paintings link to nature. With the lotus a shape symbolic of purity and calm, it’s aquatic habitat a peaceful meditation, each painting becomes a unique haiku.



Wing and leaf, feather and petal, all are employed to coalesce as lotus. Everything is possible; every combination of line and colour may be utilized, like chance joining of genetic material making each family member individual yet related.


Temperate rainforest, garden forms and pond life, the flora and fauna that surround Halloran, engender the intention of vital luminosity.

Process

Met with Lee Roberts of GOLDMOSS GALLERY just down the road. The weather, wet. We've been to their wonderful/urban (meaning modern, sophisticated, welcoming) gallery in the trees. Lee looked at 'the art' in a way that was so refreshing -- and he wants to exhibit Gord's work soon in the gallery.


Meanwhile, Gord puts a lotus leaf into the garden pond, testing the latest breakthrough in materials. It's taking a long time; he's really in a developmental stage - he's working out a process that's different for the permanent work to go on the walls and the public work to go in the water. Materials have to be ordered and shipped and then there's the drawing, sketching, the necessary computer, the printing, the application of encaustic. Mounting and framing. He thinks he 'has got it' ... and then comes up with another, sleeker, or more environmentally friendly, permutation. Yesterday it was vinyl paper. Today it's cork.


We visited Cornerstone in Sonoma. Sculpturesite. a new leaf gallery.



The gallery is open, light and full of excellent world class artwork. Suzan Hampton, Assistant Director is entranced by paintingsbelowzero, by LOTUS. They have water, and look at all that sun.


We also met with Greg Lejnieks, owner of Chloe Fine Art Gallery in San Francisco to talk about representation there. Here is Amy Nelder, his wife, but first, an amazing artist - she makes it look easy - her work is sort of hyper realist modern still life but she calls it 'pop trompe d'oeil' .. She was doing her work in the gallery while their daughter Chloe, napped. Here they are, all 3.


Today, another bright but damp spring day, we are planning for the FUNDRAISER to be held on June 17th, a Friday. It's going to be a garden party, with guests getting a preview of the installation in the garden setting. If you are interested in helping, or attending, please comment here, with your contact info. Or contact me at hickshalloran at dccnet.com