Pam Tempelmayr’s paintings tell tales in tails.
The self-taught artist’s watercolors, on display at Harbour Public House through April, feature fish and whales with a host of hide-and-seek images that reward the careful viewer.
Fish scales may turn out to be a school of fingerling salmon. A whale’s fluke may contain an eye. Diminutive herons fly the length of one coho salmon’s spine, the angular shapes reminiscent of vertebrae.
“Art should live on the walls,” Tempelmayr said. “The more you look, the more you see.”
Tempelmayr takes advantage of the shapes of her subjects to blend in the additions. In “A Trio of Orcas,” Tempelmayr paints subtle Northwest Coastal art-inspired ovoid shapes that fit the whale’s flukes and fins. Mixing a rich range of black tones, she adds eyes.
Her skill in merging the disparate images keeps the results from seeming forced. The effect is so subtle that the casual viewer might pass it by, but those who pause may realize the painting is looking back at them.
Besides taking inspiration from the formal qualities of her subjects – lines and shapes that suggest other forms – Tempelmayr combines subjects that reflect the symbiosis of their natural state.
The herons riding on the coho salmon eat the fish in the wild. The outline of Makah whalers is contained in the female whale’s form.
Into the wild
Ecological concerns are never very far from this artist, who grew up in the Canadian wilderness.
Born in Saskatchewan to an American mother and a Canadian father, Tempelmayr’s first trip into the wilderness was as an infant on the back of her wildlife officer dad.
Tempelmayr repeated the trip many times under her own steam as the family moved 16 times in as many years, experiencing nearly every natural backdrop Canada has to offer.
Tempelmayr learned silence, she says, and she learned to observe.
Painting her observations seemed a natural extension of her rambles, and Tempelmayr was sufficiently advanced by the time she entered kindergarten to be disdainful of the teacher’s stick
figures.
By high school, Tempelmayr says, she had a clear vision of her art and teachers left her alone to develop the nature painting that would be her life’s work.
“Nature and art have become synonymous in my vocabulary,” Tempelmayr said. “I believe nature and her creatures speak through me.”
Later, Tempelmayr’s children learned to take her art in stride.
“They learned to work around me,” she said. “I remember one day they brought friends home from school to find me painting. ‘That’s my mom,’ they said. ‘My mom’s weird but she’s ok; she’s an artist.’”
Tempelmayr says she often dreams her subject matter before she picks up a brush.
Other paintings may be drawn directly from nature; she sketched her herons beside the creek in which they waded.
Sometimes, as in the whale painting on display, Tempelmayr imagines the outline, but not the subtext of internal imagery.
“I woke up and knew I would do killer whales,” Tempelmayr said, “but I wasn’t sure about the rest, so I got about 50 pictures of whales and surrounded myself with them. But the photographs are just a stimulus.”
Once Tempelmayr begins painting, she knows tremendous effort lies ahead, painstaking work in watercolor, considered by many to be the least forgiving paint medium.
“I spend hundreds of hours on each painting,” Tempelmayr said. “One mistake and you’ve wrecked your whole painting. It’s a painful medium.”
Nurture nature
Advocating for wildlife goes hand-in-hand with painting fish and animals, Tempelmayr says.
The fish and whale series grew from sketches Tempelmayr made during a visit to the Atlantic coast, where she watched lobster being overfished in the same sites cod had been fished to extinction a century before.
Tempelmayr decided to focus on the plight of water creatures.
She enlisted the writing skill she had honed working as a journalist – Tempelmayr writes a syndicated garden column – to provide viewers with a wealth of information about the animals’ habitat and life cycle in text that accompanies each painting.
“Other wildlife get help,” Tempelmayr said. “Seal puppies are cute and appealing, but fish and whales aren’t. Painting them gives people a new way of looking at them.
“That’s why I was put here, to help people see things in a different way.”
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Pam Tempelmayr’s fish and whale series is on view at Harbour Public House through April 30 and at Art Soup Gallery through May. Information: (360) 394-3560 or whalebonestudio@mac.com.
