Showtime

What: Purely Pastel: 17th Annual Juried Exhibition of Pastel Artists.Ca

Where: Art Gallery of Hamilton, 123 King St. W.

When: Until Sept. 21

Phone: 905-527-6610

Pastel and passion go hand in hand. That's the combination Dawn White Beatty was looking for as she perused more than 200 pastel paintings submitted from all over Canada for this year's open juried exhibition of Pastel Artists.Ca. She chose 50 pieces and they are on show at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.

Started by a group of Hamilton-area pastellists in 1989, Pastel Artists of Ontario went national in 2003 and became Pastel Artists.Ca last year. Its members excel at working with pastel, which is pure pigment ground into a paste and rolled into a stick.

Most of the artists selected for the exhibition work in a lifelike style. While landscape and still life are popular, the human figure is very much loved, and it took several awards. Here are some of the winners.

The grand prize, named in memory of Ursula Reese, a prominent local artist, went to Glenn Bernabe for Laundromat.

Setting the scene in a laundromat hints at the stuff of ordinary life. But Bernabe's narrative appears enigmatic, like an Alex Colville painting.

A woman sits in front of a large window. Its rectangular shape complements the square tiles on the wall on the right and the verticals formed by the blinds. Such geometric shapes add a sense of order to the composition.

A palette dominated by grey suggests a sombre mood. And a bare tree reminds us of a grey season. So a happy splash of yellow from bushes below the tree is almost unexpected.

The woman's face, in profile, is slightly raised and her eyes are closed. These details invoke a serenity that is reinforced by the way her forehead catches the daylight coming in through the window. But her hand, holding the edge of the washing machine she sits on, betrays tension.

A more relaxed mood and a starker composition characterize Karen Leslie Hall's Bottoms Up.

Apparently set on a boat, this award-winning work depicts a man and woman leaning on a railing. They have their backs to us, and we're looking up at them -- hence the title.

Hall captures the intensity of light reflected off water. The deep blue of the sky feeds the nautical feeling, as does the brisk breeze blowing their sun-bleached hair and billowing the man's T-shirt.

Hall carefully builds up her solid figures with short streaks of pigment. The man's legs and shirt, for instance, consist of short diagonal lines in many colours. This kind of modelling is reminiscent of the way Impressionist painters worked.

Contrasting textures is what Dianna Ponting went for in Mandarins in Cello Packets, another prize winner. Ponting gets up close to a woven basket containing bright orange citrus fruit in shimmery, crisp, transparent wrappers with printing on them.

The official winners were not the only ones who stood out. Natalie Gerasimchuk creates a highly animated and lyrical landscape in Sunset. Soft-edged shapes dominate the composition. The setting sun, placed near the centre, is enclosed in an almond of light resembling a huge eye about to close.

And Brittani Faulkes's Embrace, a tiny landscape, is exquisite in its barely there forms that evoke -- rather than imitate -- trees, water and sun.

Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@thespec.com