Gallery Associates Sunday Art Lecture Series 2025
Presented by the Gallery Associates of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
INDIVIDUAL TICKETS – On Sale Monday, January 13, 2025
Please Note: Tickets will only be available online
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FLOWER ART FUSIONS
Flowers have long been celebrated in art. This lecture series explores domains of art history West and East that connect the natural and cultural worlds.
Flowers! They are integral to ecological systems and human cultures, and they engage many human dimensions: sight, smell, sex, sacrality, even nonviolence or military power. The 2025 Sunday Art Lecture Series explores the art of flowers and flowers in art from the garden to the fresco, manuscript, altar, canvas, and vase. Beginning with an historical overview of flowers in Western art, talks will focus on flowers in Canadian art, floral colour theory in Impressionism and beyond, and flowers in Japanese painting.
Moderated by Liam Lacey, Arts Writer
Light refreshments will be served
FEBRUARY 9, 2025 – 2-4pm
Dr. Betsy Tumasonis – Flowers in Western Art, An Historical Overview
Artists in the Western world have depicted flowers in Roman frescoes, medieval manuscripts, and Renaissance altarpieces. It was not until the 17th century, with the development of still-life painting in the Netherlands, that flowers became the subject of art, and not until the later 19th century that the Impressionists portrayed them for their own intrinsic beauty. In the 20th century, artists as diverse as Georgia O’Keeffe and Salvador Dali examined them in new and original ways. In the postmodern era, Andy Warhol and others suggested that the flower as a subject is the ultimate in banality, but in the 21st century artists continue to portray them, often commenting on the art of the past while using contemporary materials and techniques.
Dr. Betsy Tumasonis, Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, received a B.A. from the College of William and Mary in Virginia; an M.A. in Art History from New York University; and a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California at Berkeley. After teaching in the United States, she immigrated to Canada in 1981 and joined what is now the Department of Art History and Visual Studies at UVic. Besides being chair of the department, she taught undergraduate and graduate courses on the art of the 19th and 20th centuries, receiving a UVic teaching award and one in a national competition for professors in all disciplines. Since retirement, she has returned to her first love, the practice of art.
Image courtesy of Dr. Betsy Tumasonis
FEBRUARY 23, 2025 – 2-4pm
The Honorable Patricia Bovey – The Multiple Roots of Botanicals in Canadian Art
Why do artists of all generations depict botanicals and flowers? Is it that they are beautiful? That they are accessible? That they pose a challenge for composition? Or, perhaps for deeper personal iconographical meanings from those of remembrance to celebrations? This presentation explores some of the multiple roots and meanings of this natural imagery in Canadian art from the 19th century onward by artists such as Mary Pratt, Molly Lamb Bobak, Maxwell Bates, JEH MacDonald, Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, Anne Popperwell, Sheila Spence, Eric Bergman, W.J. Phillips, and early Victoria artists Sophie Pemberton and Josephine Crease.
Patricia Bovey (LL. D, DCL, D. LITT, FRSA, FCMA, FDFS), member of the Senate of Canada (2016–2023), art historian, museologist, author, and professor, has published extensively on Western Canadian art, including Western Voices in Canadian Art (2023); Pat Martin Bates: Balancing on a Tread (a 2015 Alberta Book Awards’ recipient); and Don Proch: Masking and Mapping (a 2019 Manitoba Book Awards’ finalist). A former Director of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and an independent governance and strategic planning consultant, she underlined the importance of the arts in Senate exhibitions, programs, reports, and legislation, including the law for a Parliamentary Visual Artist Laureate.
Image courtesy of the Senate of Canada
MARCH 2, 2025 – 2-4pm
Christin Geall – Cultivating Colour (Horticulture and Art in the 19th Century)
This presentation will explore the ideas of the painters, gardeners, plant hunters, and floral designers of the age of Impressionism and beyond to lend shape to a discussion of colour theory. Discover how artists drew on the history of carpet bedding; used dyes to alter fashion; explored tints, tones, and shades for pleasing designs; decided which flowers to place where; understood how colours interacted with one another in the garden and the vase; and how industrialization forever changed gardening.
Christin Geall’s work focuses on the intersections of nature, culture, and horticulture. She is the author of Cultivated: Elements of Floral Style (Princeton Architectural Press) and the forthcoming Cultivated Manifesto (Rizzoli). Trained in horticulture at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, she completed a BA in Environmental Studies & Anthropology and an MFA in creative nonfiction before becoming a columnist, lecturer, designer, photographer and author. She has delighted audiences at the New York Botanic Garden, The Houston Museum of Art, and The Artworkers’ Guild in London. Christin divides her time between Victoria and Martha’s Vineyard. To learn more about Christin visit: www.cultivatedbychristin.com or find her on Instagram @cultivatedbychristin.
Image courtesy of Christin Geall
APRIL 13, 2025 – 2pm (via Zoom)
Dr. Ignacio Adriasola – Flowers in Japanese Painting
Dr. Ignacio Adriasola of the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia will provide an introductory lecture on flowers in Japanese painting. More information about this special Zoom presentation will be provided to ticket holders closer to the date. We plan to have a recording available to ticket holders for two weeks following the talk.
Dr. Adriasola is an art historian (PhD Duke and postdoc Smithsonian) who specializes in the history of Japanese art. His book Fragment, Image, and Absence in 1960s Japan (Penn State University Press, 2022) addresses how Japanese artists developed an aesthetics of disaffection at a time of rapid change, which transformed the concept of the “object” in art.
Image courtesy of Dr. Ignacio Andriasola
Image Credits: Christin Geall, Arrangement of home-grown flowers (detail), Photograph taken by and courtesy of Christin Geall | Ogata Gekko (Japanese, 1859-1920), Ikebana Arranging (detail), woodblock print, 36.7 x 25cm, Purchased ith funds provided by Judith Patt, AGGV 2016.035.021 | Garo Zareh Antreasian (American, b. 1922) Flowers (detail), 1959, lithograph, 55.3 x 39.1 cm, Florence Scott Memorial Fund, AGGV 1958.086.001
