Anchorage Daily News

You can spot Nathalie Parenteau's art the instant you see it.

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The up-and-coming artist from Whitehorse, Yukon, evokes a unique creative personality in paint with sculptural clarity. Strong, seductive lines curving with a silken grace, usually drawing on two or three dominant colors. Simple -- but not primitive -- images with an aura of legend and storytelling about them. An illustrative approach that feels frankly populist while keeping on the tasteful side of kitsch.

With her instantly appealing pictures and clearly northern themes, one wonders: Could Parenteau be the next in the line of iconographic high-latitude artists? The next Byron Birdsall or Rie Munoz?

The artist had two signings in Anchorage in early June. In a pre-First Friday opening interview, she stood barefoot on the concrete floor of Gallery Red in Midtown, cooling her soles after a long drive in from Canada.

"I never studied art," she said. "It just came naturally. Like manna from heaven. I'm joking."

Originally from Montreal, she joined a group of youth volunteers as a teenager, she said. They traveled to the Yukon "fixing buildings, working in schools, conservation projects, anything noble."

There in the Great White North she discovered that she loved the wilderness, so she stayed.

"I spent one year in a teepee. Then graduated to a wall tent. Then a trailer," she recounted.

She worked a variety of jobs, including "a lot of commercial artwork."

"Art was always the path of least resistance for me. I never expected to make a living with it," she said.

But, starting about 10 years ago, some of her prints began to sell well enough that she realized she could make full-time art a paying proposition.

"I found a style that was pleasant to work with and dynamic for me. And there was no end of ideas."

Animals are one of Parenteau's recurring ideas. (She has a degree in biology from the University of Western Ontario.) Some of her depictions -- of a red fox or caribou -- have the animal gazing straight at the viewer, anthropomorphizing the subject. Others -- bears, whales and the recent portrait of three musk oxen, "The Gathering" -- are severely stylized and surrealistically colored.

They're almost like the animals in cave paintings, a connection acknowledged in her big acrylic "The Story Teller."

"I know these look easy, but they take a long time to do," she said. "I don't just crank these out."

She manages between 15 and 20 paintings a year.

People enjoying the great outdoors are another theme. A sense of wonder and delight flows gently across the face of the climber with a dog in his backpack in "Summit." Parenteau dismisses that kind of image as her "early cartoon style. I don't do that so much anymore."

Sometimes people and animals intersect, as in her recent painting "Moose Boy," on display at Gallery Red, the Midtown space recently opened by Rebecca Stephan, owner of Stephan's Fine Arts. Parenteau's prints are sold in stores as far away as Utah, but her oil and acrylic originals are only at Stephan's galleries, where she has shown work for five years, she said.

Then there are the overtly mythic or mystic paintings: white water turning into a raft-eating horror in "River Monster" (Parenteau says she's never been river rafting) and rocks transformed into ghostly human forms under a full moon in "Exploration" and "Solo."

Mirth can be seen in many of the pictures -- as in a dog waiting outside an outhouse in "Outhouse Pal." But others seem haunted, like the blue-eyed, anime-ish Native girl in "Distant Gaze" and the pale, staring face in "Raven Eyes."

"I guess I have some skeletons in my closet," the artist said.

"Raven Encounter" is one of several pictures in which the bird stars, but here it shares the stage with an auburn-haired female character who, likewise, appears in a number of Parenteau's works. Parenteau's partner, photographer Peter von Gaza, tells her, "You keep painting your self-portrait."

The artist herself is not so sure. If the woman in the picture is her, "It's a subconscious process," she said.

While many of her pieces strongly suggest stories, Parenteau insists that her aesthetic motive for making them is visual, not narrative.

"I'm interested in composition and balance and lines. Animals, images just appear to me. I feel like a channel."

Sometimes she looks at her finished product and imagines that someone might like to use it as the cover for a book. But she won't be the one to write the words of the tale.

"I find it's the people who look at it who can tell me what it's all about," she said.

Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.

GALLERY: See more work by Nathalie Parenteau at pixelmapper.com/Nat/NatIndex.html

ART BY NATHALIE PARENTEAU can be seen at locations including Stephan Fine Arts Gallery, 600 W. Sixth Ave.; Gallery Red, 751 E. 36th Ave.; and Picture This, 11401 Old Glenn Highway in Eagle River.

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