27th Street

Undercover, 2017, approx. 32X12 inches, acrylic and spray enamel on masonite

At some point a couple years ago I started cutting shapes out of masonite and making them into paintings or whatever it is they are. As usual I was groping around, trying to find a way forward. I wanted to break away from some of the assumptions which influenced my paintings for some years.

In several cases I used the jigsaw freehand without a drawing for the blade to follow. Well, that’s not quite true. I was making little ballpoint pen thumbnails in a small lined Moleskin. They said, make a work incorporating this gesture, or here’s a form – what happens if its allowed to dominate. Cutting is drawing. Painting is thinking. I never plan too much in the studio. When I do, I start undermining all my own plans once I get paint on my hands. I had an idea about starting with a shape that had nothing whatever to do with a rectangular picture plane. I wasn’t sure if the painting would follow that form or become a kind of counterpoint to it.

I’m happiest in the studio when I make works which reside on the very edge of my understanding, when I look at them and think, what the Hell? When they bring about more questions than answers. I confess I admire painters who plan everything, do preliminary drawings and so on. I remember visiting Ron Bloore’s studio one day many years ago. He had a drawing up, a pencil drawing, and he had made notes on it as to which white was going where. He planned out so many aspects of the final work, even though everything changed by necessity on the larger scale. I guess for him the magic lay somewhere in the transformation from the drawing to the painting.

When I do drawings in the context of paintings (as opposed to drawings because I want to make drawings), they are usually scratched out on a scrap of paper or in a little notebook in my own oddball shorthand, something to remind me of the what was going through my brain at the time.

This group of works did not mark the first time I messed with shaped paintings. I’ve messed with tondos a number of times over the years. Then there were the group of paintings I made on broken up chunks of a strange ground which I can only describe as aluminum foam. Underground. I suppose sometimes I get restless with the rectangle.

A few years ago I made some small paintings using materials like cardboard, flyers, and various other bits and pieces of stuff I found around the studio. I used an add-and-substract process, gluing materials on, adding paint then ripping back layers of material. They’re bumpy and awkward. They creep past the edges of the ground. To me these paintings feel active and vigorous.

Deluge is about 18 inches wide. Back when I was still engaged in the work-a-day world, I had it hanging in my office and there it received the best compliment from someone I work with. She looked at it and asked, “was this made by a child?” “No,” I said, “It’s adult art.” “Really?” “Yes, really.” I enjoyed having this in my workspace. It nourished my restless imagination.

I think I completed 4 of these paintings. I gifted one of them and I still have the others. They’ve never been exhibited. They were plenty of fun to make and one day I expect I’ll do more work with impermanent materials like corrugated cardboard.

In late September/early October of 2001, Sheila and I honeymooned in Newfoundland. Thanks to a friend out there we had a great place to stay in Pouch Cove. We did lots of hiking and some landscape drawing while we were there, but most importantly, the trip inspired a lengthy series of paintings when we returned and moved into a little house on Blackthorn Ave in Toronto. I had a new studio, a 12X12 wood shed behind our little house. I called it my Secret Lab. Through the fall and into winter of 2001, through the first months of 2002, I experienced one of my most prolific periods of paintings. I worked on many pictures at the same time. They were spread out on the floor, walls and on any surface which could hold a painting. These were oil paintings, which I built up over time, session after session until the final image emerged. Here is one of the paintings from that period which I still have. It’s called St. Phillips after a community in Newfoundland, near which we enjoyed a marvelous long hike through a forest which ended at a cliff overlooking the sea. I believe I exhibited this painting at Loop Gallery in an exhibition called Field & Stream. This painting is smallish, maybe 18 inches tall.

Anyone interested in this or any other painting in my inventory, anyone interested in commissioning an artwork, or anyone who just wants to talk painting, can contact me directly.

Last year I exhibited a series of shaped paintings. I was feeling like I had reached some kind of cul-de-sac with my painting – I had painted myself into a corner, so to speak, and I needed to break out. Breaking out meant breaking from the rectangular picture plane and simplifying my images, trying to see how much I could do with very little. Among the broader shaped series was a smaller sub-series I called Summer Days. This one is about 19 inches tall. It’s acrylic paint on masonite.

Summer Days, acrylic on masonite, 2017