| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Stella Coultas emigrated to Canada from England in 1965 with her family when she was ten years old. She began her art career after studying fine arts at St. Lawrence College in Kingston, ON and moving out west in 1974. She continued her studies at Emily Carr College of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design) in Vancouver, BC, then completed a B.F.A at York University in Toronto, ON. Since 1989, she has lived in Owen Sound, ON. She has exhibited work in Victoria and Vancouver, BC, Lethbridge, AB, and more recently at Owen Sound’s Santa Fe Art Gallery (2015), in the Society of Canadian Artists Juried Online Exhibition (2016, 2017), and in the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition (2017). In addition to her own art practice, Coultas serves on the Owen Sound Art Banner Committee, a non-profit group that holds an annual juried art competition.
From the beginning, Coultas has been interested in extending the boundaries of her paintings, conscious of the fact that canvas has two sides, and experimenting with what constitutes the surface. Her constructed canvases are layered paintings and sculptures composed of a number of smaller components integrated into a 3D surface. Combining colour, light, and layering makes the art viewable from more than one angle, changes its character depending on the strength and direction of the ambient light, and expands it beyond the boundary of the canvas. She uses this method of creation to explore the concept of the four “classical” elements of ancient Greek philosophy: air, water, fire and earth, as well as ideas from mythology and from cosmic phenomena.
A Thousand Used Pens depicts a window frame; the edges of the panes are defined, but all that can be seen through the window are patches of washed-out colour. Like the wall of Plato’s cave, the canvas shows only shades of a world beyond perception. The piece’s title comes in part from all the felt pens Coultas used up in numerous plein air drawings and in part because the paint bleeding through from the back of the canvas had the patchy appearance of pens squeaking out their last remnants of ink.
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