Shawn Hunsdale explains themes behind latest exhibit
A crowded and excessively noisy restaurant at dinner time may not be the ideal place to sell your art. Nonetheless, visual artist Shawn Philip Hunsdale toughed through an interview with the Fulcrum at the Atomic Rooster on March 31 to promote his latest work titled “Identification, please.”
The exhibit, which has been running since March 21, consists of 19 ink portraits and figure drawings, each of a different subject with the majority being nude.
Hunsdale reports that the inspiration for “Identification, please” is drawn from various people he knows over the past few years.
This series is only the most recent in an extensive list of works, as Hunsdale has been drawing for most of his adult life. His education in art and social studies led him around the Ottawa area and parts of Quebec, even taking a course in English literature at the University of Ottawa and displaying his work at Café Nostalgica.
For the duration of this most recent show, Hunsdale happily reports that his work has received almost universally positive feedback, and is now selling from $70 to $180.
When asked which piece was his favourite, Hunsdale was split between two pieces. One is simply known as “work 18” and is based on a person he knows closely and is “a piece that gives the greatest sense of who the person is.”
The other was “work three” which he described as “more lyrical in its gesture, and has a certain looseness and openness as well as a certain charm.”
According to Hunsdale, “the woman who posed for this one has amazing features but also holds herself with poise.”
Although the showing came to an end on April 3, Hunsdale already has plans for his next contribution at a familiar venue.
During the summer he will be hosting a life drawing event series at the U of O, where he will teach people how to draw classical life drawing, costumed poses, and long form compositional exercises.
In terms of his own personal artwork, Hunsdale said he is going to be moving away from ink drawings and try his hand at painting again.
“My exploration in oils is too new for a corpus of things I could present. I expect though that my next show will be painting again.”
