BRUSHSTROKES OF THE NORTH AND THE SOUTH, BY IRENE ABEDRAPO.

Irene Abedrapo is an accomplished painter whose work reflects her own cultural and geographic migration. Her deep connection to both North and South America is expressed through the rich tapestry of colour and juxtaposition within her work, which has the strong impressionist overtones of Renoir and Van Gogh. Although shy, she is a natural leader within her community, finding a home at the Club Casa de los Abuelos, where her atelier resides, from which she has graduated over 50 students. Throughout her adult life she has travelled back and forth between Canada and Chile accompanied by her love for art. Born in Chile to a Palestinian father and Chilean mother, she showed early promise as a painter at a young age, often entering local competitions and winning. At 25, she moved to Canada where she had careers as a nurse and civil servant, all the while maintaining her passion of painting. Despite critical praise, she chose not pursue the craft professionally, opting instead to teach the craft to the elderly and young. Abedrapo has evolved from being a simple portrait painter, to an artist whose work captures the social milieu of el migrante: from moments of hard labour and relief, to vast mountain ranges and country abodes, lush with nostalgia from nomadic experience. Her current work brings out the many contradictions of the South American people: humble yet proud; desperate, but at ease; playful yet sombre. Her subjects, troubled by new horizons, live with their own sense of silent dignity. For this exhibit, Abedrapo brings together the various rudiments of nomadic life, like a traveller displaying all of her favourite mementos. She squares her canvas like a photojournalist frames a passing local, but you feel a glaring sense of intimacy that she shares with her subjects, unlike the vanity and political posturing often overwhelming work of this nature. There is a transient melancholy to the look of her subjects: some young boys buying time before the metamorphosis of adolescence, an inopportune mother and child embarking on yet another journey, a pale golden sun, ready to retire. In one of the collections - this exhibit features three - Abedrapo draws inspiration from the famous black and white photos of Columbian photographer ***. This is the first time these works have been painted in oil, and Abedrapo gives them her signature treatment. Her palette gives these once frozen subjects a richness that leaves an impression of depth, vigour, and a range of life experience. While art is often thought to document the dead, the people in these paintings are very much alive.