Many Nanaimo residents know Yvonne Vander Kooi for her extensive acts of community service and support — teaching art to youth at the Nanaimo art Gallery, organizing community events and creating public murals and artworks that adorn parks all over the city.
Vander Kooi’s work is also a regular fixture of group and solo shows all over Vancouver Island, with paintings and subjects that range from vivid botanicals and blossoms to portraits and explorations of personal family history.
In the latter category, a portrait that Vander Kooi painted of her mother Margaret recently made the first round of cutoffs for the National Portrait Gallery’s Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait award.
“It’s not a very traditional portrait, in some ways. There’s no sitter, there’s no face-to-face, it’s more of a narrative portrait,” says Vander Kooi.
Titled Walking the Hounds, it’s based on a photo she found in her family’s collection, of her young mother walking four afghan hounds while visiting her in-laws in Holland.
For years, Vander Kooi has explored her family memory and history through stories and old family photos — some of which formed the inspiration for Passage, a 2019 body of work she unveiled at the Ou Gallery in Duncan.
“Certain photos kind of resonate for me. I think about the people in the photos and what they’re doing and what might be going on at the time. This particular photo was actually quite cinematic-looking and I just thought it was striking,” she says.
“My mother is the solitary figure in the landscape, walking these hounds … it just really resonated with me, around who she is as an individual separate from being a mother, a wife, a daughter or sibling herself. I think somehow that was intriguing for me to think about while I was painting her — as someone very separate from me.”
Vander Kooi, who earned a Bachelor of Fine arts from Calvin College in Michegan, says the formal qualities of the painting are interesting because there are areas of thick paint and spots of thinner, drippy paint, and the process involved experimenting with the materials and making decisions about what made sense to her in the moment.
“Thin washes of semi-transparent paint juxtapose heavier, more defined areas of impasto,” she writes in a description of the piece. “Interference paint in the treeline changes colour depending on light and the viewer’s point of view, referencing the unreliable and transitory status of memory.”
Though the painting is a way of honouring her mother and her family history, it’s also “about identity, who you are, and maybe even about your relationship to the world around you and who we are as people separate from anybody else,” she says. “It’s about individual identity, really, which is sort of the crux of a portrait.”
As part of the National Portrait Gallery’s competition, Vander Kooi must now ship the approximately 1-metre by 1.7-metre painting to London for a second round of judging. If her painting is shortlisted, it will be exhibited at the Gallery’s portrait show from July 11 to Oct. 27.
