Who: Karen Kulyk

What: Small Still Life

Where: Gallery on the Bay

When: Until March 9

Phone: 905-540-8532

Hours: 12 to 5 Thursday to Sunday

Karen Kulyk paints small but thinks big.

About 30 of her oil and gouache still lifes are on show at Gallery on the Bay. Inspired by a recent trip to Spain and France, they focus mostly on everyday domestic objects such as fruit and crockery enlivened with a bold, bright palette.

Kulyk, who has been painting and exhibiting locally and internationally for more than 30 years, is well known for large canvases depicting sunny landscapes and lush gardens. But in this exhibition, her pieces are comparatively small. The scale, however, is still large. So the objects she paints dominate the composition and boast a monumentality that belies their ordinariness.

Still life has a long history. The genre was loved by the ancient Romans, who commissioned artists to paint fruit, animals and ornate vessels on the walls of their dining rooms 2,000 years ago. Dutch painters in the 17th century excelled at still-life painting, often using it to convey a serious message about life's brevity. And about 100 years ago, artists such as Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso produced still lifes as a way of exploring colour and form.

Like them, Kulyk reduces objects to their essentials and emphasizes colour and form.

In Cut Melons (II), three ovals dominate: the nearly circular cut surface of a red-fleshed watermelon in the foreground, the paler flesh of the melon beside it on the right, and the rim of a blue bowl on the left. More circles and ovals lie within these shapes. The watermelon, for instance, consists of concentric green, white and red circles around a black oval.

Rectangles and triangles occupy the space in the top right, their straight lines contrasting with the chunky, rounded forms of the fruit.

The melons and bowl appear to lie on a table whose top is slightly tilted toward the viewer, but on the whole, Kulyk's pictorial space is wonderfully ambiguous. Equally intense areas of yellow, blue, green, orange and red are painted throughout, rejecting the illusion of a naturalistic three-dimensional space.

In Sea Urchins and Coffee Bowl, a kidney-shaped green plate in the foreground frames three sea-urchin shells in various colours.

In the midground, a visual battle is waged. What looks like a conch shell, resplendent in brilliant white with bits of pink and yellow, competes for our attention with the dazzling hues and diamond shapes massed together on the coffee bowl.

The Gallery on the Bay will soon be showcasing the recent creations of Tibor Nyilasi, a Hamilton artist who paints, draws and makes mosaics. A reception for the artist will be held on Friday, March 14, at 7 That exhibition will run until April 13.

Regina Haggo, a former professor of art history at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@thespec.com