After 30 years of team collaboration in Vancouver’s film industry, Joyce Woods is looking forward to showcasing “4” with “three great [other] artists.” The VIVA Alliance Gallery painting exhibit runs Sept. 10-17.

“We’ve worked close together on many projects. But we’ve never had a show where we were showing our personal stuff since our retirement,” says Woods, who helped organize the exhibit. “So it’s a pretty special project for us.”

Woods—along with Gillian Richards, Gordon Hughes, and Jean Paul Costaz—worked as a backdrop painter in Vancouver’s film industry. “I visited [Jean Paul] Costaz, who has very recently moved to Ladysmith,” said Woods. “I looked at his work and I thought it was magnificent. And I know that Gillian Richards has also been becoming really prolific and doing amazing new work since she’s retired, and so has Gordon Hughes.”

A different direction

After a meeting between the four in 2024, Woods says she began searching for a venue with enough wall space for everyone’s paintings, and found the VIVA Alliance Gallery.

“It’s an amazing space,” says Woods. “And then we just started planning.”

While much of the work displayed is in a more abstract vein, all four artists take their inspiration from what’s around them. Woods, for example, takes a lot of her inspiration for her work from water.

“In my retirement, I started exploring different things and looking at […] how I relate to water,” says Woods. “The idea of going to a beach for the sake of calming your mind, or looking at the surface of water the way we do, and it just somehow connects us to calmness.”

Richards’ work, meanwhile, takes more inspiration from the urban landscape, with “a fantastic, loose brushstroke” and choice of colour layers Woods describes as “very painterly.” For Hughes, materials such as cardboard create “really unusual textures” which, according to Woods, gives his work “a real strong sense of space and shape and colours.”

Costaz, Woods points out, is leaning in a similar direction, albeit in black and white. His works are beautiful because they are small and very textured. “He’s entered into an abstract phase where you get these mysterious shapes,” says Woods. “And sometimes they look almost organic or like a landscape, but they’re not.”

For the public

Woods believes the work shown will be “accessible” to a contemporary audience, in that people will be able to relate to it in a way she says is harder with most modern art.

“A lot of modern art is a little bit more obtuse, hard to relate to,” says Woods. “But I think people will. Even though it’s all quite contemporary, it’s something people can relate to.”

Woods hopes the exhibit can serve as a jumping off point for Richards, Hughes, and Costaz to show off their work in other galleries after their run at VIVA ends.

“I’ve had about 30 solo exhibitions here in Vancouver,” said Woods. “[Jean Paul] hasn’t really exhibited too much; nor has [Gillian] or Gordon during the time they were working in the industry. But their work is extraordinary.”

For Woods, getting an exhibit and having the public see it is a “pretty special” experience for artists—especially painters.

“An artist might paint for a whole year or two, and then have an exhibit, and the exhibit’s only up for one or two weeks,” says Woods. “A number of people come, and then it’s over and gone, and you just don’t have that same show again and again.”

For more information, follow the exhibition at @4arti_sts on Instagram