High

 

There's a certain kind of playfulness I've learned to respect, and court. It's best to stumble about, humming, poking your nose into interesting places....

 

...and it can be so contradictory, because while you have to learn, and have models of excellence to guide you at times, you can't Aim for that model....there is simply not enough adventure in that....it's about way more than learning skill....you have to find some useful guiding principles underneath everything....

 

I take much guidance from the elements and principles of art....and I always need those in any specific analysis.....but all that is a given and relatively easy for me to deal with these days. I can count on my ability to analyze and come up with solutions in each case. But beyond that, I look for an ease, a very simple movement from one thing to the next, a kind of absentness in myself, a lack of self-consciousness, that lets the thing made continually surprise me.

 

...there are very many things that can get in the way of this.....and they can be slippery, hard to nail down...but I try to watch for them....

 

....the picture is a relationship of elements....an arrangement of things coming together. There Always is a way for the things in this picture to come together....easily. The picture doesn't have to look any particular way...but it has to click together. While there should be craft....there should be no artifice. There's nothing to show off...all the pieces have to fit together.....or none of them fit...

 

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September Pasture

(Sold)......Using the collage also helps me deal with the initial impact of the scene (the reason why I chose it). It forces simplification and concentration on the essentials. Without the collage, there is a tendency to complicate.....the eye sees many things and wants to record 'as is'...but the mind is more selective and leaves a lot of things out.....as if you say 'this is the thing that affected me...this is the more important part!"

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8 Inches Square

This is about all I know....
Never mind the style, everything you've learned, the degree of finish.....the world around you is moving and alive......the picture will reference the world but it has to be kept to that general statement, not more specific than that......and the picture has to have a pulse, give the illusion of being alive as well......just that.....let the picture have a pulse.

..on 8 inch gessoed thin Masonite panels, some done right on location, some in studio with collage in the first stage...

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Stylistic Range....

(top image, sold) I seem to have 3 types of pictures that I alternate between. One type is a straight observational record, with plenty of abstraction and design underlying the construction....but it attends to a strong desire to set down what presents itself to the eye (this type is not shown in these slides, but you see examples in the post previous). The second still follows observation but also asks for more 'bending' (emotion and interpretation also informs everything seen)....and the last type is based on memory of location but does not necessarily conform to the experienced visual layout. I need all these 3 types to account for my experience of this wonderful place I'm living in.....

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April Breeze

April Breeze (Sold)
...April is moody and erratic, but I love her anyway. Acrylic collage painting on heavy archival paper, 11 x 15 inches, image size 9.25 x 11 inches.

 

In these collages I prefer to use old papers. I saved some papers from my teaching years. I'd often ask my students to prepare idea lists and preparatory drawings at the start of projects. These idea pages would be stapled together and kept on shelves in the studio for their reference the next class. Few students ever claimed these prep things at the end of the year, and in June there would be piles of things to throw out. When I started making these collages I'd sometimes save the used 8.5 x 11 inch papers in stacks. I still have a bit of this left. I'm often very charmed by the things I see on these pages.....little bits of history that are both insignificant and endearing when put into a different context. Our days are fleeting...and it's sweet if some little hint of our time here can survive. In this piece, at extreme left by the horizon, you see a star/asterisk entered in ballpoint pen. That was where a Grade 9 student wrote her name, and a punctuating symbol afterward. I don't know why that charms me....but it does to no end. Little hints that we were here....left behind...but largely invisible....

You'd be surprised how the stacks of old paper mount up after years of teaching....piles of old photocopied project sheets, assignment sheets....I left a lot of that behind and have used up much of what I've saved for collage papers....

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Snow Sky

Acrylic on gessoed thin birch panel, 5.75 x 9.5 inches. Although all of these are small, it remains very important to have variations within the sizes. I knew, for example, that this one should not be 9 x 12. I am most free when it feels like I'm mumbling to myself, and the small size somehow allows that to be the case.

These is something about the small scale that makes this all seem like a secret world. I know that may sound silly, especially when I often photograph and list them the same day they are made. Sometimes they are mailed out the very next day, or they sit here for a time, but it all feels like a silent, peaceful writing in a hidden journal....

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Garden Hill, Indian Summer (Sold)

 

9 x 12 inches, acrylic on gessoed, thin birch panel. I like small panels, but I must like paper a lot better because almost everything I do is on paper. I like panels for encaustic painting, which I've also been meaning to get back to. I like that panels can be displayed easily....they can be more simply framed, or just leaned up on a shelf. I also loved doing a previous series in which I laminated paper onto panel first, and then gessoed the whole thing. The surfaces of those were beautiful to paint on, but there was a fair amount of work that went into the preparation of each panel.

I always love watching the mark making that happens all through each piece. More and more, I tell myself that the sequence of little decisions, how each mark fits into the thing beside it, how the paint sits, how the colour creates interactions with neighbours, is really what the whole thing is about. There are no extras. Each part fits. And of course, understand that every mark made is like a mark made in the dark.....I really don't know how it will fit in advance. What I try to see and do is believe in each mark....closely watch it happen as the picture is made. This is just a way of saying that marks can't be made randomly and carelessly. Every 'touch' made will add up to a picture....so every 'touch' is important.....as important as every other....

Don't feel you have to figure everything out in advance. Figure some things out in advance, but a lot of things will be figured out in the process of making....

This is a view of Garden Hill, 15 minutes north of Port Hope.....a view that I pass very often.

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Trout Pond, Overcast

 

.... a little sanctuary near the village, public land with 2 trout ponds, forests, hills, and streams,....I enjoyed all my time there through the years. Acrylic collage painting on archival paper 9.5 x 13.75 inches, image size 7.75 x 10.25 inches.

These collages often start with one piece of paper, or sometimes 2 colours together that start to create a mood that was pervasive at the site. In this case, those 2 piece were the grey of the sky and the not quite fully dark green/black of the trees. I was hoping from the start that I wouldn't need to cover up too much of the grey, and am glad I was able to keep most of it. You never really know what will remain in the picture. In the attempt to get everything working together in a beautiful balance, anything might have to be sacrificed....

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Nightfall, October 13 (Sold)

 ....the quick changing minutes before dark. Acrylic collage painting on archival paper 7.5 x 11 inches. The collages are very different from the paintings, because in the collages the first mood is made by placing the first 3 or so colours. This is different than painting the colours in because the colours can be chosen AND changed in a second. I have 1000s of these colours beside me. The mood of the work ends up subtly different in the collages.

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Thanksgiving Collages

 

Acrylic collage paintings on archival paper 7.5 x 11 inches. The paintings feel much different and are done differently than the collages. When I start a work one of the first questions is 'should this be a collage or a painting'. As well, sometimes there is much paint added after the pieces are glued, and sometimes there is nothing added. Those ideas are there at the start. The collages also tend to be a little smaller. One of the key beliefs in the collages is that it should be possible to create all that is necessary through the interaction of 5-10 colours and shapes. So it follows that there should be no extras in the work...only essentials. Both the collage and painting processes allow and encourage both adding and subtracting. The final arrangement can be discovered either through putting on, or taking away.

 

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Climb at Dusk (Sold)

 ...into October....the weather has changed, with frost just around the corner. Acrylic and pencil on unprimed Whatman paper 10.25 x 13.75 inches, image size 8.75 x 12.25 inches.

"....Or else he could elect an art class. He'd never taken one - art hadn't even been offered at the academy - how hard could it be? During the summer he'd often studied Sarah's drawing of Ikey Lubin's and even wondered what role it might've played in pulling him, against his better judgment, into Lynch World. Would he have enjoyed Ikey's as much if he hadn't seen it through her eyes? He liked the idea of getting people to see things as he did without them even being aware of what he'd done. Now THAT would be a trick worth knowing." 'Bridge of Sighs', Richard Russo

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2 paintings in one day

Today 2 paintings from yesterday's diagrams made on the evening walk. There are times when I want to avoid inevitability.....I don't want the picture to look predictable. Rather hard to do entirely when the picture needs this and that....it's a landscape for god's sake. So I tell myself well, maybe it could be all black...no colour at all....as a way to open up the process completely. I didn't make these all black, but that was the pre-thinking for it....and the process did feel very freeing. I try to do lots of mental things to free up the process.....part of the 'set up' for each picture. Slightly different guidelines lead to different series.

Currently I'm looking at some colours pasted to my door where everything was pared down to nothing.....3 colours together....and wondering if it's as good as anything else I do. I think not, but there's something to the question. Everything should be easy, and there are lots of things we tell ourselves pictures need, when in fact they may not. Making the guidelines you choose to follow is more than half of the enterprise.