Jakoba Van Dyk’s acrylics illuminated the tiny Roberts Creek Trading Company Gallery with their rich, prismatic colour in September. The show was a step in a decades-long journey for the abstract expressionist painter. “I just love painting; it’s a miracle, my first love, the main thing in my life,” she says – and yet it is a love only recently discovered.
After studying for a Bachelor of Social Work at the University of Alberta in Calgary in the mid-70s, Van Dyk contracted fibromyalgia. Hoping to find relief in the milder climate of the West Coast, she headed to Vancouver – and, shortly after a spontaneous day trip to Gibsons in 1980, she made the Sunshine Coast her permanent home.
In 1991, she started dabbling in watercolours under the auspices of the Gibsons Art Society (GAS). “I had never painted before in my life – although people on my mother’s side of the family painted. I always said I couldn’t make a straight line. And then I realized – you don’t want to make a straight line when you’re painting!” Mainly self-taught, Van Dyk found a mentors among the members of GAS, which operated the Hunter Gallery in the 1990s. She tried charcoal, pastel, oil, and then – an epiphany.
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A 2004 workshop with Dick Phillips offered by the Gibsons School of the Arts “just opened my eyes to abstract acrylic and I totally fell in love with the medium. After that, I could feel myself growing as an artist; with this medium, every time I paint I learn. The painting grows in my mind, and then it just sort of oozes out of my fingers. Sometimes I think it’s messed up, but then see something in it, and try again in a different direction and something different comes out of it. It’s like making love – you can’t plan it, you have to sort of let it happen.”
Van Dyk loves the freedom of abstract, and revels in marrying the image with the brilliant colours offered by acrylics. “When you paint something that already exists, it’s imitation; when you do abstract you create something totally new in the world and it feels so wonderful! When it happens – then it’s like the greatest gift you give yourself, because something totally new has been created in the world, and that is what keeps me coming back to it. And I love colours! Bright, primal colours – the way they fit together, the way they complement each other, how they influence each other. I’m really such a student still.”
Jacoba Van Dyk welcomes visitors to her home studio gallery at 898 Reed Road, Gibsons, open to the public every Sunday, 12 to 6 (or by appointment – call 604.886.7307).
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