Essay

John Ballantyne: Filling Emptiness with Meaning

John Ballantyne is fascinated by emptiness. He paints empty rooms, empty seats, empty stages. One of his favourite subjects is the Brome Fair grounds off-season, the stark white buildings completely desolate. But these emptinesses, paradoxically, are not really voids. John sees a deserted stage as filled with expectation and disappointment. An empty church is loaded with humanity’s complex relationship to god and religion. The absence of human or even animal figures in his paintings conveys a sense of alienation and abandonment, but here too he sees something else: the empty interior spaces are always filled with light, a metaphor for divine enlightenment. “We are never completely lost in the dark,” he says.

Having given up on formal schooling, in his early twenties John finally heeded an inner voice that told him to “buy a paintbrush and go to work.” He went to Toronto, “where we all painted as fast as we could, copying the huge abstract paintings” of the late sixties. It wasn’t long before John realised this wasn’t his style. Inspired by Shaker-like simplicity, John is more akin to Alex Colville and Christopher Pratt of the East Coast school in the stark precision of his work. He likes to work very slowly and carefully. Painting full time, he devotes a few months to each painting. He points to his most recent work: “just the grass took five weeks.”

Though spare and austere at first glance, John’s paintings are always striking in composition, even unsettling in their proportions and perspectives and in the interplay of human constructions in natural settings. But another look reveals a richness of texture in the surfaces and a playfulness in hidden details. He is amazingly meticulous in his technique, and uses thousands of dollars worth of specially made brushes to achieve the effects he wants. He does preliminary drawings complete in every detail, but claims he is “relaxing a bit now, and will leave some things out.” His studio is as uncluttered as his art, all his pencils and brushes perfectly organised. He has even devised special methods for preventing smudges on his work, delighting in all these technicalities as much as in his painting.

Yet despite his painstaking work, John is relaxed. Jovial and engaging, he has the air of a man happy with his life and his art. Indeed, it seems his particular style is more the result of a spiritual serenity than a tendency to be tense. “Actually, it’s a reflection of my mother, who valued order above all else,” he says. But then he tells me, “it’s a guy thing; guys love tinkering with details, figuring out how things get put together.” And this is what John does in his studio filled with light.