GALLERY
Our gallery is free admission and showcases the talents of many local and emerging artists throughout the year.
Main Gallery
Mycelia is known as an underground fungal network that forms a symbiotic relationship with trees - We believe it also represents our strong connections to each other in the bealart program, our school community at H.B Beal, as well as our London community. We are privileged to share the result of these connections with you!
This year’s exhibition will be held from January 15 - February 1
Opening reception is January 17 6pm-9pm.
We are also proud to acknowledge Haiden Campbell as the artist behind our artwork for this year’s poster.
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​​Bealart is Southwestern Ontario's oldest Visual Art institution located within HB Beal Secondary School. For over 110 years Bealart has helped students, adults, artists, and makers of all types reach their goals. The alumni of Bealart have made significant contributions to the art scene Canada and around the world with alumni like Greg Curnoe, Murray Favro and Patterson Ewen. The founder of Bealart, Mackie Cryderman, believed that visual art training is about exploring, developing strategies, and adapting, which are essential qualities for all of life's endeavors. Bealart is the only Secondary School in Ontario with 8 professionally equipped studios including Ceramics, Drawing, Digital & Interactive Art, Painting, Printmaking, Moving Image, Sculpture and Textiles. Each studio has been outfitted with specialty equipment that rivals or exceeds that of Post-Secondary institutions and commercial businesses. Our Studio courses begin in Grade 9 and take advantage of these one of a kind facilities.
LAB 203
Community doesn’t just define a place where citizens live together, or where a group has something in common, characteristics or interests shared — a community is a gathering of people with values that include helping and inspiring others. Wyn Geleynse’s series Community Portraits embodies, illuminates and celebrates those multiple facets of what a community means.
Originally conceived as a simple exercise in painting the portrait of a close friend and fellow artist, Geleynse saw a bigger project as more friends and acquaintances from his walk in life — from the person who prepares and serves his coffee, colleagues from the arts community, a shop keeper at his local stereo shop, co-workers at the Mission Store where Geleynse volunteers twice a week, the woman who cleans the building that houses his studio — various members of Geleynse’s community stepped forward to be caught in paint on his paper canvas. With forty-one portraits, a series was born from that simple exercise.
Almost, because both subject and artist had to agree to the finished work, and two portraits of forty-one didn’t quite make the cut. They exist but with black bars over the eyes, a playful gesture implying that the artist doesn’t always get things quite right. That playful nuance is, however, part of the process in all of Geleynse’s portraits: each portrait is entitled Almost followed by the name of the subject, suggesting the artist’s slight insecurity in delivering a perfectly rendered portrait, but equally that all subjects have a defining “Je ne sais quoi” that is their personal stamp of character and identity. All beauty comes with flaws. As Leonard Cohen sang, “there is a crack, a crack in everything… that’s how the light gets in.” Geleynse’s portraits capture some of those “cracks” and equally, let that radiant light out of each of his subjects.
This series of portraits is presented one or two at a time for a month, beginning at Milos Craft Beer Emporium last September to December and now at TAP Centre for Creativity. It’s an unusual method to display an exhibit but one that almost mimics the way we encounter our friends and cohorts and acquaintances in daily life, a pleasant reminder that our communal time together is slightly fragmented.
It’s said that it takes an entire village to raise a child, and the equivalency is that it takes a community to make each of our lives function, from the quotidian details in our walk of life, to the bigger picture of what makes life meaningful and colourful. In a series of work that is bigger than the sum of its parts, Geleynse’s Community Portraits also proves that it takes a whole community to inspire an artist.
Vince Cherniak Dec.14, 2024