I dropped by the opening reception for Peter Templeman’s exhibition at Yumart this afternoon. I enjoyed the exhibition very much and had an opportunity to chat with Peter about his work. It’s a funny thing – I’ve been aware of Peter’s work for years and he knows my paintings as well – but somehow or another our paths haven’t really crossed before.

Peter has made a set of tasty, painterly works for this exhibition, rich in texture with images and colours that seem to emerge from the act of painting.

When is a painting finished? When do you stop to breathe? When do you walk away? As a painter, one of the things I experience in the studio is how quickly a painting can resolve itself after days and weeks and months of work. There it is. No fussing about – and yet the story of the painting emerges through its layers as the paint has been built up and scraped off and built up again. I felt a lot of empathy for Peter’s process with these new paintings because they brought to mind my own experience navigating through a painting. I suppose in that way you might say Peter Templeman is a painter’s painter.

Peter’s colours are deceptive. There is a predominate earthiness throughout the exhibition, and yet within each individual painting, there are areas of rich colour that became more obvious to me the more I looked at these paintings. I spent quite a while looking at the show this afternoon, and a number of the paintings – in particular the smaller ones in the group – kept drawing me back in.

Peter Templeman’s exhibition at Yumart continues until Saturday March 22. Check it out if you can. Yumart is at 101 Spadina Ave here in Toronto, just south of Adelaide on the east side – walk up to the second floor.