Doyle Street artists embrace variety of styles

Walking into the Doyle Street Art Fair, I’m surprised to see actor Brian Heighton sitting at the front desk.

Actually Heighton studied art before he "fell into acting," and he’s exhibiting with four other local artists in a "pop-up" art gallery in the former Italian Market building at 5413 Doyle St., Halifax.

Jeremy Akerman, also an actor, as well as a former politician and a painter, saw the space for rent and invited Heighton, as well as J. Vincent Walsh, Jacqueline Steudler, Mary Ann Archibald and Sarah Jane Conklin, to exhibit their works at the Doyle Street Art Fair until Dec. 21.

The paintings range from Heighton’s depiction of hockey sticks plunged into a snow bank after a backyard hockey game in Halifax’s North End to Steudler’s hot, hard-edged, semi-abstracts of flowers. There’s a bit of questionable sculpture in this show, but the painting is strong.

Heighton loves to paint the flat-roofed, colourful North End houses and hopes to do a series in acrylic "before they go."

He also exhibits a small landscape of the island at Dollar Lake, where he camped for the first time this summer and discovered the giant turtle that lives near the island. He captures the pine trees reflecting in the water.

Akerman hangs his work in a salon style with a crowd of landscapes and portraits in all sizes including a series of small, vivid portraits of politicians like Howard Epstein and G.I. Smith, as well as actors Michael Moriarty and Tom Selleck.

His landscapes include swooping misty highland landscapes and dancing Halifax paintings of city lights and the harbour.

Mary Ann Archibald is a sensitive portrait painter who captures a soul, and a story, as well as a likeness with a soft, gentle touch in her oil paintings. Her portrait of William Hall hangs in the Nova Scotia Legislature. Archibald also exhibits still lifes of flowers, demonstrating a gift for painting glass, and landscapes like Winter at Wolfville which perfectly captures the winter light and harsh blueness of the Minas Basin in winter.

Fall River artist Sarah Jane Conklin has a highly individual style of worked up oil on canvas surfaces which she beautifully describes as "deliberate entanglements of brushstrokes" and hot, contrasting colours with lots of oranges and greens in her rushing river series, which she exhibited as River Ballads at the Peter Lewis Gallery in Saint John, N.B., in May.

Conklin has a painting featured in CBC Radio Information Morning’s 2012 Sharing the View Calendar, now on sale at Sobeys as a Feed Nova Scotia fundraiser.

J. Vincent Walsh brings the beach into the gallery with the beautifully composed, subdued and lovely Beach Stone Composition #1, as well a closeup of a traditional buoy in Killick #1 and a stretch of beach at Martinique.

He demonstrates his range with still life and figurative work.Steudler, like Conklin, is defined by a unique colour palette in paintings ranging from abstracts of land or sea, horizon line and sky, the powerful patterned flowers and small splashy abstracts of jots of colour.

All the works at the Doyle Street Art Fair are for sale.

"It’s not like Walmart but yeah, they sell," says Heighton, who as an actor is in DMV Theatre Collective’s remount of The Ugly One in Calgary in January and is in a new DMV production in Halifax in February. "I think people are pleasantly surprised. They go, it’s great. It’s a sleepy street, they find it’s local artists and they think that’s great."