If you’ve ever felt driven to abstraction, catch this month’s exhibition at the SAGA Public Art Gallery. A juried exhibition of the North Okanagan Chapter of the Federation of Canadian Artists, “Driven to Abstraction:  Reading Between the Lines,” opened Oct. 2.

Local artist Marg Robertson is back to the canvas, after taking a hiatus to raise her children, and has dabbled in abstraction.

“People think that abstract has to be that you can’t see a recognizable image,”

she says. “But contrary to that, you usually start with some type of image and then take away from it and change it until it’s maybe not even recognizable anymore.”

The challenge for the artist in this show was to create works that speak to the mood of the concept rather than to the concrete aspects of the words.

“What I interpreted that to mean was, instead of making a non-objective type of abstract work, I could take a subject, like say the horse, and put it into a abstract background or mood,” she says. “I added some collage to entice the viewer to look deeper into the pattern and find the story I was trying to tell.”

“I had a little story about the horse being the drinker of the wind from Arabia, the birthplace of Arabian horses,” she says. “I took the little story, cut it up and worked the pieces into the collage, and the challenge for the viewers is to try to piece it together and look into it that way.”

Everyone is welcome to attend an abstract art-making event hosted by the federation at the gallery on Thursday, Oct.15 from 1 to 3 p.m.

Four great artists from the federation will be on hand to help participants to create a collaborative art project.

Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.