Ginny Trousdale's Road to Abstraction

Julie Druker | Jun 11, 2015

Ginny Trousdale of Sydenham began making art as a photographer 20 years ago and recalls one particular painterly photograph that first inspired her to pick up a paint brush 12 years ago. “I never felt I could draw realistically,” she said, “ though I always knew that I was creative.”

Years later and after much learning and practice, she has come to realize that she is, at heart, an abstract painter. After completing an intensive three-month course at the Haliburton School of Fine Arts in July, 2014 where she had the time and space to explore the roots of what inspires that abstractionist bent, she finally took up Kim Ondaatje's offer to have a show of her work at Blueroof Farm in Bellrock.

The show titled “So Far” showcases Trousdale's work in a variety of mediums that demonstrates both her love of line and her impressive and intuitive sense of colour. The photographic works in the show hearken back to her first love, photography and she uses her pictures of real things and places, like the pictures she took of a mural at the Children's Library in Oaxaca, Mexico to use as a spring board to create abstract compositions that demonstrate her fascination with line. She has cropped the photos, making their origins unrecognizable and she layers them to create abstract and highly graphic compositions - in effect using known worlds to create her own new imagined ones.

Her “War Series” works, inspired by old letters and maps from World War 2, continue her fascination with line, but with the addition of abstract symbols inspired by cartography of that time, as well as “hobo symbols”, a kind of symbol language used by street travelers in the Depression era to communicate to one another.

This work and these ideas inspired Trousdale's most recent abstract paintings, large colourful works that have a Paul Klee-ish and Wassily Kandinsky-ish kind of feel to them, where graphic lines and broad swaths of colour together with abstract symbols large and small create worlds that can be sometimes calm and soothing, and at other times jarring and complex. Her term “creative cartography” can be aptly applied to these works, large paintings on paper and one titled "Backroads", which by name and appearances looks like a map but you can bet that no such place exists. In this work, coloured lines of all shapes and sizes curl, twist and turn back and forth through the expanse of the paper space, with large and small unknown symbols popping out and hinting at other worlds, places and meanings, perhaps forever unknown or maybe long forgotten.

These works capture and hold one’s attention and invite the viewer’s eye to move freely through a space unknown, yet somehow familiar in an inexplicable way. In her own words, Trousdale describes her fascination with these unknown worlds. “Painting pushes me to find ways to visually express and explore my world and I am fascinated by what I don't see. Searching for meaning involves digging and looking because the surface rarely reveals what is actually beneath.”

In her personal journey to artistic expression, Trousdale shows that she has dug hard and deep and the results are an impressive show in abstraction that demonstrates exactly how far she has come on that long and hard-earned road. The final viewing of “So Far” will take place Sunday, June 14 from 2 – 6 p.m. at Blueroof Farm, 6313 First Lake Road in Bellrock, just west of Verona.