Dr. Irene Naested, Professor Emerita, Mount Royal University. Irene is a visual artist, award winning educator and published author. She hosts a day long exhibit and sale of local authors, poets, visual artists, and musicians, the second Sunday in September, from 10:00 to 4:00. This year, 2022, it will be on September 11th. Please check out her website for more information. www.passporttothearts.ca
Irene has long since believed that all the arts are narratives of what the creators and audience bring to the artifact with their individual, collective and social experiences, assumptions and understanding of their world.
Increasingly her visual art (which often combines printmaking techniques of mono-printing, stencil, stamp, silkscreen, relief….) her poetry and prose can be considered as visual non-linear narratives.
A non-linear narrative presents the events of the story out of order, employing flashbacks and visual and literary devices to shift the chronology of a story. The narrative become fractures of timelines for emotional or thematic connections between non-contemporary events.
Irene’s words and images have become reminiscent of Henri Rousseau’s work. Rousseau was a French post-impressionist painter (1844 – 1910) considered the archetype of the modern naive artist using amateurish techniques and unusual compositions. The paintings portrayed vivid colour, ambiguous space, non-realistic scale in anatomy and perspective, fantastic imagery from a hybrid of influences. These paintings fashioned a dream like quality with direct emotional impact.
