Art exhibition celebrates beauty of grasslands

By Laureen F. Guenther Times Contributor

The Grassland Series, from a growing body of artwork by Lethbridge-based artist Colin Starkevich, is on exhibit at Rosebud’s Akokiniskway Gallery until Aug. 31.
The works in the series are realistic scenes, mostly wildlife, all from Alberta’s grasslands region.
“My love affair for the grasslands began in the summer of 2009,” said Starkevich, who was at the gallery on Aug. 3.
Starkevich was studying wildlife and fisheries conservation so he could learn to portray wildlife accurately, and when the class studied Alberta’s natural regions, Starkevich was especially fascinated by the grasslands.
“That summer, I headed out to the (grasslands) region and that’s when the love affair began,” he said. “I was just hooked on the wide-open space and all the unique wildlife. It was then that I knew I’d likely spend the rest of my life portraying this region in my artwork.”
The Grasslands Series includes three types of work. His oil or acrylic fine art paintings, researched and realistic, take weeks or months to create in his studio. Plein air paintings, in oil, are stylized and done more quickly on location. Erratic drawings are pen and pencil drawings of little rocks and boulders, called erratics, scattered around the Prairies.
One small painting is Beating the Odds: Swift Fox, which Starkevich made after observing a pair of swift foxes near their den. “I was able to sit quite close to them and photograph them and just kind of hang out with these swift fox,” he said. “I’d never seen them in the wild before and I couldn’t believe it.”
He titled the painting Beating the Odds because the swift fox were once extinct in Canada, but were reintroduced into the wild and are now doing quite well.
A large painting called Navigation depicts a pronghorn antelope navigating through the wide-open grassland landscape. Starkevich is currently working on a follow-up to Navigation, a large oil painting of a female pronghorn antelope, standing atop coulees of the South Saskatchewan River.
Starkevich often encounters attitudes that the Prairies are boring and empty, or that the glory of the region has been lost to agriculture and development. He believes neither is true.
“When one spends time in this region, the landscape opens up and there’s wildlife all over the place,” he said. “There’s still lots of places left today that are full of wildlife.
“That’s what I’m celebrating… to make sure we have it for our future. I really hope that people can fall in love at least a little bit with the grasslands after viewing my work.”
Starkevich attended a master artist seminar with Robert Bateman, who invited him to enroll after seeing Starkevich’s early work. He’s had his work juried into many exhibitions in Canada and internationally. He is also a member of the closed group Artists for Conservation, the Federation of Canadian Artists and the International Guild of Realism.
He donates a portion of each sale from the Grassland Series to conservation organizations working in the grasslands regions of Canada.
To view Starkevich’s work, visit colinandthegrasslandseries.com.