By Jeanne Beneteau - Staff Writer
Running through May 1, the Art Gallery of Northumberland's, The Upstairs at Port Hope Gallery, showcases paintings by Merike Lugus. The show, dubbed 'Definitely Not Black and White', features a selection of "quite bright, quite colourful" works, says Ms. Lugus... paintings that reflect her ideas translated on canvas.
"My paintings deal with my concern about vulnerable things like the environment and the plight of children, as examples," she says. "I believe in North America, there is an awful lot of hypocrisy surrounding children. We say we want to make things better, to protect them yet very little gets done. The poor just keep getting poorer."
The catalyst for one of the pieces in the show, 'The Child Bride' came 10 years ago when the artist read a newspaper article about a middle-aged European male who was arrested after he stepped off a plane with a 12-year-old child he claimed to have married after a visit to Thailand. The article went on to say it was common practice for foreigners to "avail" themselves of young children in economically vulnerable countries, she explains.
The Cobourg artist says 'The Child Bride' represents her outrage at this horrific practice. The painting portrays the enormous power difference between a European male and an Asian child, which accomplishes the expression of outrage.
"Then I set the two against a brilliant background suggesting our globe and surrounded them with the troubled but silent faces of four Buddhas," she explains. "It's a painting I like and my only regret is that it's not 10 times bigger, because size, too, is an important element in expression. But then, I live in a house with few walls!"
Every artist is faced with the dilemma of how to say what they want to say, she explained adding the next step is to express that view with passion through either anger or love.
"A young artist friend once looked at my paintings and said, in his view, to express my real feelings I should have painted jagged red X's across some of them," she explains. "Maybe he's right."
One way around the dilemma is to add the dimension of mystery, she explains. In her painting, 'A Child With Six Aunts', chosen for the July page of the 1997 Canada-wide Big Sister Lottery Calendar, six women wearing bathing suits and sitting on chairs surround a child who is lying centered in a square in the middle of the painting, illustrating "it takes a village to raise a child." Six black dogs are evident behind each of the women... thus the element of mystery.
"Are the dogs for you or against you?" she says. "This is the mystery left up to the viewer to decide."
Although she didn't figure it out until much later in life, Ms. Lugus says she is convinced her formative years have played an integral role in molding the person she has become and has influenced her art. Born in Estonia in 1943, her family fled Germany in 1944 to escape the Russian invasion and she lived in a refugee camp until the age of four, she explains.
Another painting on display at the Port Hope gallery, 'The Thief of Childhood' deals with this very issue... the effect of war on children. In this painting, the child is dressed in a ballerina costume, suggesting a life interrupted by the violence, she explains. The bogey man, in all his grimness, has become a reality and the child is robbed of the fairy-tale fantasies that should have been a part of the innocence and imaginativeness of childhood.
Ms. Lugus expresses her ideas in a variety of mediums including sculpture, poetry and writing. She is a published poet and author and has a novel to her credit, 'Leaving Lake Surrender' and is currently working on her second book. Not content to let the grass grow under her feet, she has also been taking singing lessons over the past four years. It's nice to be busy she adds, and as long as there are avenues left to explore, "I will continue."
"Life is large, huge, immense. I witness a tiny portion of it," says Ms. Lugus. "If I can somehow hint at its full richness (in my work), then my own experience of it is put into perspective."
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