Wanda Koop

“Building” in the Pool of the Black Star, Legislative Building, June 1983

I liked the thing Bill Eakin said to his wife after they had finished installing the 33 panels of Building in the small circular room in the Legislative Building, called the Pool of the Black Star. Wanda felt somewhat discouraged by the effect the room’s diffuse lighting had on her work. Her husband encouraged her to accept the conditions and rejoice. After all, he said, “you gave your painting to the space.” Not only had she given her painting to the space, it also seemed the space had been waiting for it.

Except for one other art exhibit some years prior to Building’s installation, the hallowed space of the Pool of the Black Star stood empty. Virtually unaware of this ideal space but desperate to get the work shown last fall, at a friend’s suggestion, Wanda made a number of phone calls which gradually led to an enthusiastic response from Eugene Kostyra, the Minister of Cultural Affairs and Historical Resources. The result was the union of Building and the Pool of the Black Star.

This satisfying rapport between art work and room is due in part to a numerical coincidence. The painting’s 33 panels make up 11 full paintings. Each of the 33 panels is four feet across by eight feet high and each painting is composed of three panels. The entire work, then, extends a total of 132 feet around the room.

The room itself is supported by 16 Doric columns, above which are relief circles, one circle for each column. The room has four doorways, although the painting blocks access to three of them. At the centre of the room, enclosed within a black circle, is the black star of the room’s name, its eight points directing your eye back towards the walls. The number of its points corresponds to the height of the painting your eye meets there.

On approaching the pool from any of its doorways, except the northern one, you are confronted by eight-feet-high, unpainted plywood boards, buttressed with two-by-fours. The impression is of something under construction inside the pool.

At the northern entrance, your eye falls upon the final painting. It’s a powerful, sobering work, containing at its centre various structural shapes that recall parts of buildings under construction. The shapes cast strong, haunting shadows. They are close-fitting and balanced, but, at the same time, they seem to say, “we are not only parts of building, we are ourselves buildings and we house the spirit of building.” A circle of white light dominates and floats freely at the painting’s centre, at the same time that it seems to be attached.

It’s a fascinating coincidence that the circle of the final painting (the only such circle in the painting’s 132 feet) corresponds not only to the shape of the room, but also to the repeating circles above the columns. A beautiful visual triangle is formed between the circles above the two columns closest to the final painting and the circle in the painting.

This discovery of a close visual connection delighted Wanda as it seemed the ultimate evidence of an already uncanny rapport.

Building starts at the left side as you walk in the door. Its 11 compositions, painted with crude, thick, bright Roplex acrylic, become more complex and emotional. The eye moves easily from painting to painting, hopping rhythmically from colour to colour over a common horizon line. Starting in the sky, the eye hops down to earth, from earth up to sky, from sky to earth, and so on, around the 132 feet. At times you feel happy in a colour; at times you feel sad. The painting is a score for human emotion.

Building was inspired by a feeling Wanda experienced last year, as she daily passed by the construction site of the new Great West Life Building at the corner of Broadway and Osborne.

While many other Winnipeggers were criticizing the rising monolith for its blandness, Wanda was discovering its sympathetic soul. She felt joy seeing the shapes of the building’s anatomy, its strange open spaces casting eerie lights and shadows, and its aspiring steel girders crossing and crisscrossing the coloured sky backdrop. But that joy was mixed with sorrow in the recognition that an old, familiar neighbourhood was being demolished to accommodate it.

What you see in Building is a complete dialogue between artist and medium, stimulated by a moment in time, but enhanced by life-long memories and a profound love of art and life. This complexity of emotion is responsible for Wanda’s forms and colours, their impurity or “humanness,” their warmth, their chill, their charm. The paintings seem the work of a primal spirit and appeal to that spirit in ourselves.

Utterly charming in a different way, is the physical contrast between the hallowed hall—all classical refinement, all perfect symmetry, all grace and restraint—and the work it envelopes—all crudeness, all stockiness, all strength, all impurity, all bare emotion.

The final coincidence is that Building is exhibited right next to the now completed Great West Life Building.

Wanda says she can’t imagine Building being exhibited again in anything but circular form. She says, too, that the hallowed halls of the Manitoba Legislative Building have changed in her imagination since she gave her painting to its centre space. ■

Eleanor Hannan is a Winnipeg artist who contributed an article on being a young painter to the last issue of Arts Manitoba.