In the Station House’s main gallery this month a unique series of portraits based off of over the top selfies can be found in Making Faces.
At its core Making Faces’ artist Janice Sich wanted this project and exhibit to be a fun one. Sich is a recent retiree who got back into art just over a decade ago, after graduating from the Alberta College of Art and Design in the 70s. When she got back into painting on a more regular basis, she found most of her old paints dried up, save her oil paints.
Deciding she liked the look of them, Sich made that her main medium as she likes the way it “defines a picture and makes it crisp.”
“I was born a creative person and even in retirement, I felt the need to be creative,” Sich explained. “I have a den and I use it as a computer/art room.”
After painting landscapes for a time and making funky furniture, Sich wanted a change of pace and to paint on a smaller, more intimate scale. So she decided to do a self-portrait, reasoning those were always fun and a good study besides.
“So I took a couple of selfies but those were pretty boring and lame. I made a ‘bah-humbug’ face and captured that and I thought ‘that is pretty funny, I’m going to paint that face’,” Sich recalled. “I just loved it and so did everybody else so the next one I did was my 98-year-old mother and I just went from there.”
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Every one of the portraits she’s painted since has been real people, mostly from her home of Kelowna, and are a mix of people she knows and total strangers she approached on the street. Sich has taken a lot of pictures but has found that not everyone is able to, or willing, to make the dramatic faces her project requires.
Making Faces is currently made up of 26 10” X 8” framed canvas portraits of different people making a wide range of humorous, silly and sometimes delightfully disturbing faces.
As many are self-conscious about looking this way, however, Sich has made the theme of pieces all about letting go of vanity and embracing the humorous side of life.
As such the paintings are not meant to mock the models nor are they caricatures of them.
Instead Sich took painstaking work to bring the selfies to life on canvas, showing not only the expressions but also the emotions flashing across her subjects faces.
“Some people find the exhibit hilarious and others find it disturbing, it conjures up a lot of emotions in people,” Sich observed, adding at previous showings she often saw people attempt to replicate the expressions.
In the future, after she’s concluded her work with Making Faces, Sich intends to focus more on displaying emotions in portraiture, in the style of 18th-century sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt.
He was known for creating ‘character heads’ that displayed extreme expressions of excitement, alarm, distaste and surprise to name but a few. As these and other emotions are a part of life, Sich sees no reasons why the faces they create shouldn’t be put to canvas.
“I don’t have time to do all this painting, but I’m really enjoying it,” Sich joked.
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As for what she hopes the people of Williams Lake take away from her work, Sich said she hopes the community will take a look at themselves.
Be it through seeing themselves in the various pieces, or simply considering the face they present to the world, Sich hopes her work will inspire some self-reflection.
Sich concluded by saying she’s honoured the Station House considers her artwork worthy for display and hopes the fun-loving residents of the lakecity enjoy her work. Making Faces and Kevin Easthope’s Lessons in Indigenous Settler Relations, showingin the Upper Gallery, are on display until the end of the month for free.
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