Elaine Goble

Elaine Goble is an unrivalled master of realistic, large-scale graphic portraits and landscape paintings.

She is one of the few Canadian artists who works with the ancient medium of egg tempera paint, which has a history spanning more than 3,000 years. In the fifteenth century, tempera was largely supplanted by oil painting, and it wasn`t until the early twentieth century that the tempera technique was revived and popularized by European artists.

 

 

Abbozzo Gallery presents an important facet of Elaine's work – her landscape paintings, which are distinguished by the painterly and graphic clarity of the modelling of forms and the sophisticated colour scheme. This result is achieved by tempera paint, the specificity of which is that it creates a delicately harmonised colour scheme. In Elaine's case, these are ocher and greenish ocher tones.

The central theme of her landscapes is "the life of the earth." In a way, they serve as self-portraits of the artist—her reflections on the fluidity of life, the comprehension of its beauty, and its preservation through art. The emotional expression of these thoughts is often embodied in the image of a lone tree (in her paintings) or the sky (in her graphic compositions).

Elaine’s works are deeply intimate, fostering an emotional connection with the viewer. This intimacy is also evident in the portraits held in the gallery’s collection. The focus of her work is on the individual, whose story and versatility she seeks to convey.

Speaking of the portrait genre, it is worth mentioning the artist's most famous series of portraits dedicated to veterans, Holocaust survivors, peacekeepers, and their families. In these works, the artist acts both as an artist and historian, documenting the "legacy of war" through the portrait. In essence, her portraits are history in personalities, and even a study / research, focusing on the human destinies affected by the ordeal.

In general, documentary is an important component of Elaine's art. However, this documentary is full of emotional experience and artistic interpretation. This can be seen in the artist's images, which capture fragments of the interiors of old Canadian wooden houses. They are defined by an unsurpassed compositional solution based on rhythmic alternations of vertical and diagonal planes that create a sense of dynamics.

Therefore, Elaine's works have a dual value - artistic and historical. It is no coincidence that many of her works are exhibited not only in art museums and galleries, but also in the War Museum, New Branswick Museum, National Library and Archives, and Ingenium Canada (Canada Agriculture and Food Museum). For the latter, Elaine created a series of paintings dedicated to Canadian farm animals, in which she proved herself to be an unsurpassed artist of the animalistic genre.