Unseen Paris Ochre (detail), 2017

Symeon van Donkelaar

Symeon van Donkelaar - Waterloo, Canada

Revealing Nighttime Local Colours, an earth pigment installation and part of the ongoing, 'Hieroglyph Stories of Canada' series. Seen at Nunu Ethiopian Fusion, Symeon van Donkelaar presents his work as a pigment hunter who has foraged local colours across Canada. His pigmented scrolls manifesting the Ontario landscape's brilliant blacklight colours and their tales, revealing the muse embodied in each while addressing our limited perceptions of the earth and environment in which we live. Having taken dozens of pilgrimages to communities across Ontario to collect earth from these landscapes, he reveals new brilliant hues from these places that are only visible at night. Van Donkelaar builds on his investigations of local colour as shaping knowledge through journey, bestowing value in making, and enabling creativity by imposing limitations. Previous projects include The 100 mile Art Project: Cambridge (2008) and Pilgrimage: Finding Canada’s Local Colours (2015).

Symeon van Donkelaar is an artist with a passion for local colour. He explores and listens to the heritage of the lands where we live—its culture, history and spirit—and with its colour creates art that reveals the spirit of a place. Van Donkelaar studied Eastern Orthodox spirituality and iconography, and is self taught in the use of earth pigments. He exhibits and teaches regularly, and holds an MFA in conceptual art from the Transart Institute.