Venne remembers his grandmother’s gentle instruction as they walked in her garden, or up to the farm to milk the cows: “Look at everything.” The emphasis here, I think, is on “Look.” Take the time to attend to what is in front of you, what is real. Focus, and truly see it. She also encouraged him to “Take care of everything, even the insects.”

For someone like Venne who learned from his grandmother how to “look,” how to “take care,” there is in the elements of the northern landscape endless variation in the play of colour texture, light and line:

Our relatively short summer covers us with transparent heat (at times) and threatens us with rolling line squalls and sudden rainstorms. In winter, leaden clouds thrill us with occasional shafts of pure golden sunlight. Winter understates itself in subtle greys and blues or shocks us with dazzling whites. My horizons are not formed by concrete skyscrapers but by open spaces, flat and rolling farmlands, forest and ancient hills, spruce swamps and pine ridges. It is a landscape that imposes visual and often physical strain. (Artist’s Statement, 1991). 

Venne has spoken about his artistic influences, “in-fluence” being another kind of transfer of imaginative energy that occurs both by serendipity and by deliberate seeking. When he was a young boy, Venne’s teacher, Mrs. Martindale, in a one-room schoolhouse in Cane, Ontario taught the children everything from knitting to art, how to create after an encounter with the natural world stretching out in all directions around them. She introduced them to works by the Group of Seven, a fraternity of painters now household names in Canada, famous for articulating and realizing a recognizably Canadian art, especially but not limited to their depictions of Canadian landscapes.

The Group of Seven member Lawren Harris observed: “No man can roam or inhabit the Canadian North without it affecting him, and the artist, because of his constant habit of awareness and his discipline in expression, is perhaps more understanding of its moods and spirit than others are.” Venne’s earliest influences, then—his grandmother and Mrs. Martindale—equipped him well to grow into Harris’ vision of the northern artist.

As Venne recognizes, distraction is one of the most insidious elements of modern life with its demands of “everything everywhere all at once.” We are in denial that we are finite creatures and that we must choose where to put our attention. It was recognized as something to be vigorously resisted even a century and a half ago, by the great Scottish-American environmentalist, John Muir, who wrote: “I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.

What is “the news” for Muir and Venne if it is not to be found in “the trivial world of men?” For Muir, it is the great joy of being part of Creation, walking among the sequoia in what he considered to be sacred forests in Yosemite, or on its mountains and glaciers and meadows. While Venne is doing something different from Muir—art from his experiences of northern Ontario—both men partake of a kind of transfer of imaginative energy, of spirit , between themselves and the natural world.  It is a true exchange, in that Muir’s work to establish a National Park system in the U.S. benefited the wilderness that so nourished him, and Venne’s art brings to him and to us news–revelation–of the interconnection between humans and their environment, both individually and collectively.

So, while living in the North eliminates distraction for Lionel Venne, he makes clear that these northern landscapes are not easy. Their apparent simplicity demands a rigorous discipline, for Venne tells us he is not interested in “a mere emotional outburst in celebration of nature” but something closer to the idea expressed by a curator of modern art, that “Every work of art is an incarnation: an investment of matter with spirit.”

Venne has stated of his landscapes that “The horizon is always my first interest, where earth and sky become one and matter meets nothingness. ”His art partakes of the mystical, which for him in this context means a “concern with making tangible that elusive relationship between the physical and the spiritual(Artist’s Statement 1991).

As Muir observes,

By going out into the natural world, I’m really going in.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), one of the founders of abstract painting, expressed the same idea: an “inner necessity” driving “those seeking for the internal in the external.”

Venne uses what he sees on his peregrinations in the Northern Ontario landscape and indeed on his world travels, to express his inner spiritual and emotional landscape; in doing so, he traces the deep and often surprising connections between humans, the spiritual, and the natural world. Nowhere is this more evident than in his collage work: various materials (cardboard, string, wire, fabric, maps, etc.) are juxtaposed—that is, put in relation to each other–such that we see connections and associations that were not apparent in the materials on their own.

There is a book to be written about Venne’s fascination with the liminal—those meeting places of earth and sky, matter and nothingness, the physical and the spiritual, paint and paper, white and black, the of different artistic materials—at which an osmotic or symbiotic exchange of spirit occurs, and the transfer of imaginative energy takes place.
Inspiration of a Northern Landscape is an example of Venne’s mastery of collage (literally “gluing”) or assemblage. We need to recognize that “collage cannot be defined adequately as merely a technique of cutting and pasting….Its significance lies not in its technical eccentricity but in its relevance to two basic questions which have been raised by twentieth-century art: the nature of reality and the nature of painting itself. Collage has been the means through which the artist incorporates reality in the picture without imitating it” (William Seitz quoting Margaret Miller).

Venne’s Inspiration of a Northern Landscape demonstrates this principle in that we can discern elements of landscape— earth, hills, water, sky—but the expectation of a straightforward representation of “a” place is quickly surprised by the compositional playfulness of scale, proportion, perspective, and colour, as well as by elements that do not correlate to any material reality: drawn lines in the form of x’s and grids, for example, layers of torn and cut paper.  His collages act on us like music and makes the same demands on our imagination. Think of Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun, in which the feeling of a “scene” is evoked by the flute, the melody, and so on, but our imagination is also busy working to paint a picture.

In Venne’s collage, Northern Lights seem to glow across the top of the picture (or are they floating icebergs or mountains?) but the blue orb in front of them throws into question even the basic question of whether we are looking at day or night. The work does not elicit fear or frustration in this viewer, at least, but curiosity and wonder. There may be no human figures in Venne’s landscapes but they convey in no way a sense of absence. Even stripped to their basic forms, colours, lines, the elements of these landscapes combine to transmit presence, intelligences, secret or privileged knowledge that is yet accessible to all of us if we only know how to look, how to attend, how to take care, how to “get the news.”

Venne’s modus operandi is to paint from memory rather than en pleine air, so that here we have a kaleidoscope of memories of northern landscape, in which earth and sky seem to want to burst out of their “places” and turn cartwheels in the air. Our eye is free to combine and recombine the elements, turn cartwheels with them in a joyful dance. The collage invites us to play with it.

Venne’s collage is not so much “a” landscape as “landscape” or perhaps “an experience of landscape.” It frees us from the practice regrettably so often seen in museums and galleries whereby visitors will lean in to look at the label next to a work of art before looking at the work of art itself so as to “know” what they are looking at. Few are confident or perhaps playful enough to trust that their experience of the work will be meaningful in and of itself whether or not they “get it” get the “official version.”We need to trust ourselves! 

In other words, Inspiration of a Northern Landscape asks us to “inspire” it, or take it in to our own memory and imagination and play with it, make its energy our own.

When we place Venne’s description of his Northern environment from his Artist’s Statement, quoted above, next to the following rhapsody of John Muir about the Yosemite landscape, we can see they are kindred spirits, deeply spiritual men who bring back the intelligences of the natural world for their and our own invigoration. Muir writes,

We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass and the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun—a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal. Just now I can hardly conceive of any bodily condition dependent on food or breath any more than the ground or sky. Like Muir but in a different landscape, Lionel Venne is in North Ontario and it is in him, “kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver.”

There are five pieces in this exhibition whose theme is night. The earliest of these five works is Venne’s collage, Night Landscape, created in 1990. Three Moons was created in 2000, and three more pieces were created between 2019 and 2022: Entering the Night (2019) Northern Lights Over Mountain Lake (2021) and As Night Approaches (2022).

We might consider these works as a group of nocturnes, working like music to evoke memories and impressions of night that seem largely benign rather than sinister. They do not suggest to this viewer, at least, negative associations of the night such as loneliness or isolation, danger, or least of all, evil. The painter James Whistler’s Nocturne series—paintings of the Thames River at night—conveys more of the tranquility conventionally associated with musical nocturnes than do Venne’s pieces, but an inherent sense of mystery is shared by both men’s works.

While there is a profound spirituality at work within all of them, Venne’s landscapes do not seem to depict a “dark night of the soul;” there is so much light and energy in them. It may be that the rhythms of day and night are used here to reflect an acknowledgement of life nearing its natural end. Always, the humility of the artist is present, acknowledging the grandeur of creation and his own participation in it even as he does not presume to tame it or dominate it.

Venne blends abstract and more representational elements in all of them, although one or the other mode predominates in service to Venne’s recollection of different experiences of night and the various feelings night has evoked in him on different occasions. There are different intelligences, different energies at play in these collages, such as the great motion of wind and stars that makes its way across the sky in As Night Approaches.