The Art of the Earth Show and Sale opened at the Jasper-Yellowhead Museum and Archive on Friday evening.

Artists Wanda Whaley, Edith VanderKloot, and Anna Carnell spent all day Friday setting up the show, and in the evening the doors opened to the public.

Wanda Whaley, from Bentley, Alta. makes cave style paintings using the traditional means of grinding rock into a powder and combining it with oil to make paint.

“What I have done is gone back to where art began, on the cave wall,” said Whaley. “It goes back as far as 50,000 years.”

“I’m using old slate shingles. These are over 130 years old, they came off a roof,” said Whaley. “There is a lot of weathering on them, and that weathering gives me things to work with.”

Whaley said cave art was very minimalist, having no foreground or background.

“Everything you see in the backgrounds or foregrounds, it’s all natural in the rock. So I work around what I’m seeing in the rock,” said Whaley.

Some of her other paintings are on old semi-circular roof tiles form the Pyrenees in France.

Whaley says cave art told stories, so she has tried to replicate some of the myths that she is familiar with.

“I have things in there (the slate) that will help me tell that story. So there are stories I’ve been able to tell, and there are lots I haven’t been able to tell,” Whaley said.

Edith VanderKloot from Millarville, Alta. uses a more contemporary form of rock painting.

“I choose the tile. The background is important,” she said. “Then I use different mixed media, mostly pastel, acrylic, inks, and pencils.”

VanderKloot uses standard 12 x 12 inch slate tiles similar to the ones used in housing.

“The tile becomes my canvas, and I’m restricted to the size,” she said. VanderKloot said she looks for tiles that have depth and texture, which gives her direction for what she is going to do with it.

“I love everything underwater, like in the ocean,” she said.

Several of her pieces on display at the museum have underwater themes, one of which is called Vulnerable Deep. It carries a message saying, ‘protect the oceans.’ In this piece an underwater reef is dragged by a fishing net, destroying the beautiful abyss.

“I don’t look for the tile for say, and I don’t look for the subject for say. But in my memory of my travels something comes out,” said VanderKloot.

Anna Carnell from Millarville, Alta. works with stones by making collages and mosaics.

Carnell said when she started making art she recalled a memory of being three-years-old and doing the same type of thing.

“I had this brain flash,” she said. “Sitting at a great big rock – it was my smashing rock – my mom used to put glue over a piece of plywood and then I would fill the plywood with smashed rocks.”

“50 years apart and I’m still making rock pictures,” she said.

Carnell’s art combines slate, glass, tile and fossils to create mosaics, many of which have practical applications.

One of her pieces, at the gallery opening, proved to be popular with the patrons. A chessboard was laid into a wood table and the pieces were natural river stones.

“I guess that’s the idea, to make people want to touch the stuff,” Carnell said. “That’s the form and function thing.”

“Anything that is really beautiful should have a beautiful form, but also have a useful function – I think,” she said.

Carnell has evolved her mosaics to incorporate geometric designs such as the Fibonacci spiral. Carnell said she learned in a grade eight math text that an elephant’s trunk and a sheep’s horn make the Fibonacci spiral.

“Once you start looking for it. Once you absorb it, you see it everywhere, and you do it,” said Carnell.

The Art of the Earth Show and Sale is on display at the Jasper-Yellowhead Museum and Archive until March 28.