Homage to an artist: Gerald Folkerts (1958-2009)

By Jenna Smith and ChristianWeek | June 19, 2009

A superb artist passed away on May 30 at the tender age of 51.

An award-winning painter, art teacher and former president of the Manitoba Society of Artists, Gerald Folkerts was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2008 (the doctors called it a "butterfly tumor" because it touched both hemispheres of his brain). As the irony of life would have it, during the months leading up to his death he wound up as vulnerable and fragile as the people he painted during his career as an artist. Folkerts' Christian values of love and compassion were intrinsically present on his canvases: he painted the sick, the marginalized, the unloved. His subjects were homeless men, fatigued women or people in wheelchairs.

Folkerts' series "Head over Heels" is a collection of two-part pieces or tryptichs in which only the subject's face and feet are shown, side-by-side. We can only guess what his subjects' bodies looked like. Exposed are wrinkled cheeks, tired eyes, worn-out work boots or old, swollen feet in flip-flops. While these images are incredibly realistic, Folkerts' use of colour is surprisingly unatural. His subject's hair might be blue and pink, her skin colour tainted with hues of yellow and purple. It's as if the entire world of "Head over Heels" is shadowed by the artist's pallet.

His earlier series, "Restless Slumber," depicts people sleeping. Despite the quiet of nighttime, his images reveal pain and discomfort. The two women in Nightmare in Chernobyl and Forgotten in Chernobyl sleep in bare, bedraggled bedrooms in which the paint is peeling off of cement walls. No Time to Sleep reveals an old man on a street bench. Waiting for Eternity portrays a sleeping figure covered by a golden sheet. It is perhaps the masterpiece of this collection—the creases and details painted to perfection.

Folkerts is no stranger the Christian artists' community. Waiting for Eternity is the painting that won third place in the 2002 Imago Arts national competition entitled "A New Heaven and a New Earth."

There is an honesty to Folkerts' art: roughness and poverty are exposed, yet never exploited. There viewer is moved, but never disturbed. The issues dealt with are hard, but Folkerts presents them with great care. The beauty of his paintings, in a certain sense, restore dignity to those he paints. There is pain, but there is also peace—peace that perhaps only contemplation in God's presence can bring to such suffering.

Once her father was diagnosed, Folkerts' daughter Dana started a blog in which she journaled about her father's battle with cancer. The blog, "A Gravel Road Journey," is named in honour of her father's studio. Folkerts once said that "gravel roads take us off life's busy highways and force us to slow down. When we slow down we have time—time to notice the things around us; the things that matter the most; life and breath, the flowers and the trees. Gravel roads allow us to taste the dust of our travel and give us more time to breathe."

You can view Folkerts' art at www.folkerts.ca.