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Laver acquainted with the night

BY ROBERT AMOS, TIMES COLONIST MARCH 17, 2012

I Want to Be a Shining Example, oil on canvas, by Mark Laver.

Photograph by: Supplied photo, timescolonist.com

On a lonely road somewhere after midnight, Mark Laver sits in his van, peering into the darkness. The darkness is relieved by a single streetlight, a porch light in the distance, and clouds scudding across the moonlit sky. What's he doing there?

Inside the van, in the dim glow of the rear dome light, he is hunched over a makeshift easel hung off the steering wheel. He's doing night paintings.

"Nighttime helps me simplify, to resist the temptation to put everything in," Laver told me. He paints quickly, knocking in the velvet blue sky, swiping reflections of the streetlight on the road and, as a background to it all, black paint.

"There is less fussing around with a limited palette," he says. The little panels he paints are almost monochromatic with a few dark flashes of colour. "I can't really see the hues," he admits. "I don't use the front interior light anymore. I go by what I know."

As a father of three youngsters and driven by the need to make the rent, Laver has spent his days at a series of "mostly part-time" jobs. To some degree this explains why he was driven to find time for meditative painting after midnight. That said, he has a strong emotional attachment to the dark times.

Growing up in Bowser, north of Qualicum, Laver remains a country boy at heart. He waxes nostalgic about "the nighttime highway when I was growing up," and he reminisces about "bonfires at the gravel pit parties." Among the paintings included in the current show are his Island Highway by moonlight, the Beach Drive bushes caught in the sidelight, and Victoria neighbourhoods after bedtime. "Seeing things at night," Laver paused; "it's sort of not permitted." If you see someone parked and waiting in the dark, staking out a dark street, you wonder what they're up to. Should you call the police? So far no one has knocked on his window to ask what he's doing. Once, when he set up his easel on the side of the road at night, someone did stop to comment. "A bit dark, isn't it?" they asked, and went on their way.

Laver also rents a studio, an eight-by-12-foot room which is stacked with wooden panels more than two metres across. These are mostly his "Rural Disaster" series, paintings centring on the aftermath of car crashes and burning trailers in the woods, which all take place after dark. Unlike Andy Warhol's famous "disasters," Laver sets his in the rural zone familiar as our Island home.

For reasons he can't quite explain, Laver discovered certain images on the Internet that he found "exhilarating." His search began in 2006. The first ones were online at sites from smalltown fire departments, and police crime-scene photographs. These were never meant to be photography as art. "They're deadpan, pure information," according to the artist. Tangled metal caught in a flashbulb's glare, bare trees silhouetted in flame and, all around, the enveloping mystery of the world after dark. One can see the attraction.

"I hid the first few paintings from everyone," the artist says. It's not that Laver is a dark soul. In fact, he's young and healthy and has painted a lifetime's worth of sunny hillsides and sandy beaches. Although he is aware of the tragic narratives of the disaster paintings, this doesn't seem to concern him. He finds in his subject "a certain amount of realism balanced with oil paint and what it can do." He is involved "in the visual excitement of painting, not thinking of the narrative - if someone died or who they were. For me it's just so much about paint."

And Laver knows his way around paint. His training began with a two-year program under Ian Thomas at Camosun College. Then he went on to a degree in philosophy and art history at UVic, which provided a sound basis for his practice. At that time he also participated in searching sessions as part of the Chapman Group, a group that focused on an exploration of contemporary philosophy and its relationship to representation in painting. Unforgettable leadership in this group was provided by senior artist Jim Gordaneer, whose influence is discernable in Laver's vigorous brushwork. It is an old tradition for an oil painter to learn from a master.

Laver's Disasters had their debut last summer at the Penticton Art Gallery. When the current show of his Rural Disasters and Night Paintings concludes at the Legacy Art Gallery, the full Disasters series will be shown at Winchester Modern on Humboldt Street. And, as a sign of his gathering success, two of Laver's paintings have been chosen as cover art for the reissue of Daniel Woodrell's novels. As Woodrell is the author of Winter's Bone, now a famous film, and the publisher is Little, Brown of New York, it seems safe to say Laver is an artist on his way up.

Mark Laver: Shining Examples, at the Legacy Art Gallery, 630 Yates Street, 250-381-7645, uvac.uvic.ca, until March 31. For more pictures go to marklaver.blogspot.com

robertamos@telus.net