Unfinished paintings, December 2014

I paint in sessions, in spurts, in which I work on several paintings more or less at once. At this time, my studio is filled with small canvasses. If I were to put a single work up in the studio and nothing else, it would feel very strange. I like to work paintings off one another. An idea or motif might be developing in an interesting way in one painting. What happens if I change it and try something similar over in another.

Sometimes I declare a work finished, convince myself it’s finished, put it away, snap some photos. The painting really is finished if I don’t put it back into play. It’s really that simple. Other paintings I’ll just put away, sick of looking at them. I can always bring them back into play at another time.

I’ll often emerge from a painting session charged up, excited, while at the same time totally disappointed in myself. How did I ever make a painting in the past? Why does it elude me now? I paint on that edge. The fact that painting remains a mystery to me even after all these years may well be what keeps me coming back for more.

I work each session wet-in-wet these days, and I’ve been painting with oil paints for the most part, but because I often space painting sessions a few days apart, a new session is marked by sharper lines and purer colours. Work and re-work, think and rethink, paint and repaint. When I’m working on several at once as I’m doing now, I feel like a chess champ taking on several opponents at once. Champion or chump. I make them up as I go, improvising on motifs, ideas, images, lines, and so on.

These days I make mostly small paintings. That wasn’t always the case, but for now working this size suits me. Perhaps I would think differently if I had a larger studio – certainly when I did have a big studio, I did make some very large works. Back in 2006, we drove to Montreal to see a painting show by Anselm Kiefer called Heaven and Earth. It was an exhibition that originated in Fort Worth Texas and had traveled to the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal. I mention this exhibition because the works were huge, just enormous, colossal, gigantic. They were impressive for their sheer size. They were also impressive for other reasons. I think Kiefer is a great painter – but that exhibition got me thinking about size.

I appreciate the ambition involved in giant works of art, but the downside of  making paintings on that scale is that they can only really live in museums and other huge buildings. At a certain point I decided I wanted to make paintings on a modest scale which people could live with, paintings that could hang in a home, rather than paintings aimed at institutions. Making works that are powerful without the benefit of scale is another problem altogether.