An end result

I have painted the simple subject of a tree standing in a field many times. This subject has a kind of simple beauty and truth about it, while serving as a great subject in the process of developing technique. The way light and wind describe the randomness of branches and leaves fascinates me, along with the underlying fractal order. Over the years these paintings have evolved from a Zen-like stillness to a more romantic vision. This romantic vision can be problematic because I am averse to sentimentality. Sentimentality is personal emotion , or emotion in the context of a personal story or memory. The kind of emotion I am trying to convey is more of an elemental one, occurring in the moment, and related to the natural forces at play.

Some of these "sublime" style painting have been anachronistic, looking like a background of a 19th century narrative (what one gallery calls my "Wuthering Heights" style.) This look is fun to paint, but it is not the thing I am aiming for. Some of the images have come out way too pretty. After working on this for some time, I feel like this canvas has a good formal balance in tone, colour and range of contrasts. It marks the end of the tree as a central focus of the painting.

"Energy is Eternal Delight"

When in the midst of painting a canvas, I find the very idea of Life having "meaning" disappears. First of all, the notion that life as a whole can have meaning is an absurdity. This has meaning relative to that, and this has purpose in the context of that, but this and that together have no external context in which to take measure. Life as a whole cannot be contained in some ultimate meaning. This is not the same as saying life is meaningless, because to be "meaningless" is to have negative meaning. It is more accurate to say that life is free of either meaning, or meaning's absence.



Ultimate cosmic purpose, no matter how glorious, is a nightmare scenario where everything is bound, subordinated, and ultimately reduced to that purpose. Thankfully this is not the case. All that can be seen is endless play..... free play. This free play has, in human experience, a basic feeling tone of ever-rising, or Joy. It is superabundant.

As William Blake said "Energy is eternal delight".

New Painting July 09

This is inspired by the over-the-top theatricality of David's "Napoleon crossing the Alps".

This painting is on exhibition at Gallery 133 in Toronto.

New Painting May 2009

In this simple composition the focus is on a play of subtle atmospheric tones.

This painting is on exhibit at Gibson Fine Art in Calgary.

Artist's Statement: Calm and Clear

In my landscape paintings, I am trying to convey how the earth and sky appear when they are not being pushed into the background of daily life. So often when we look at a landscape it is embedded in our personal and collective stories, under layers of association and sentiment. When I become aware of this and choose instead to look with a simple eye, the landscape comes forward, and there is a sense of it's various elements coming together “just so” in a single gesture. I believe that this perception of harmony is not just in the eye of the beholder. There is an objective component that includes our own biology and that we recognize as beauty. A work of art that is tuned to this harmony is alive, and has an intrinsic value that needs no interpretation.

January 2009

The first painting of 2009 is a commission based on this photo I took of "Mount Nemo" which is a section of the Niagara escarpment. Working from a photo is a different kind of challenge than working from memory and imagination. Changing the perspective, proportions or location of individual features to meet formal goals is not easy when a certain amount of fidelity to a photograph required. So the creativity lays elsewhere.......in selection, emphasis, and tuning of contrast colour etc. I will retro post the painting beside this photo when it is finished.

Winter storm at year's end

The first big storm of the season is blowing in. This, together with the absence of sun before the solstice is creating an atmosphere of perpetual twilight over the city. It's just before Christmas and work is getting put aside. The year is winding down, the studio feels quiet. It is not a time for energetic painting. My sketches for January are taped to the wall, and the canvases have been primed.

2008 has been a challenging year, as the energy both given and received from two shows has given way to sober thoughts on art and the art business. As I am finally able to paint with the skill that I have struggled toward for so long, I can see more clearly than ever that there are a lot of amazing painters working today who are just as committed as I am. It would be wise to really take in and respect their work, and also to acknowledge the good fortune of making a living.

2009 from the perspective of December 2008 is looking daunting. We are apparently entering an economic bottleneck that could change our way of life. If so, the values of adaptability and letting-go will prove essential.

....... live simply, paint pictures.

New Painting December 08

This painting is of the first morning blanket of snow in 2008. The light of the approaching dawn is reflected off the fields. The cool tones of the snow and warmer tones of the open section of sky strengthen each other, making the blues and violets of the winter shadows more intense. The clouds are true winter clouds, meaning they are free of any convection, any internal dynamic. They are long and low.

Level Gallery in Collingwood

Collingwood Ontario sits in one of the most beautiful areas of the province, where the Niagara Escarpment meets Georgian Bay. It's where I do alot of sketching as I wander along the windbreaks and open fields. So.. when I found out about a gallery there, it sounded just right. Level gallery is upstairs on the main street and it carries a lot of interesting young artists. The owner (and artist) Paul Mantrop has good energy and the space has a nice quality about it. I haven't had time yet to take much up there, but I"ll be taking new winter landscapes up soon.

http://www.levelgallery.ca/

New Painting Summer 08

This painting is based on forms and colours on display during the summer storms of 2008. The distant clouds (immersed in a pink glow) are framed with the cooler tones of closer clouds. The land recedes from warm yellows towards cooler greens and blues. This enhances the three dimensional effect as it dips and rises through different zones of light.

Development of Technique

When I began painting I had a good aptitude and strong sense of purpose, but little technical knowledge. By studying original oils in galleries, a certain amount of technique could be understood, but in the end it has been a long process of trial and error.
My approach has been conservative in terms of composition in order to focus on developing skill at rendering texture and light. The process goes something like this…. With each canvas I experiment with a new effect. At first this effect is self conscious and requires a lot of effort, but as it is practiced and refined in subsequent paintings, it begins to flow with some grace. At a certain point it becomes intuition and is superseded by the next conscious effort. In this way a full range of skills accumulates over time. This long process is reaching the point where I am confident in exploring a range of different visual languages and subjects. The painting. "The Niagara Escarpment at Georgian Bay” was a turning point in that it opened up a new direction in composition. I am spending more time now sketching from nature and imagination in order to expand on this.
Here is a series of paintings that shows the development over a 12 year period. You can see a widening visual vocabulary and a greater degree of naturalism, all within the same simple framework.........

Fall Show 07

This painting (flowers bloom 36x60) was painted for a show at a Toronto gallery in October 07. There was concern on my part, and no doubt on the gallery's part, about the subject matter, because it is a departure from my main focus of landscape. There are many stylistic, cultural (and commercial) pitfalls to something like this. My main concern was that "spiritual" art has fallen on hard times in the post-modern era, being relegated to a fringe of new-age kitch. The reasons for this are probably many, but the fact that post-modernism has been the prevailing force in the arts over the last thirty years is important. This stream of thinking tends to reduce transcendent realities to constructs of language, and this can have a kind of flattening effect on perception. Many painters seem to be embarrassed with spirituality unless it is addressed indirectly or with irony. Instead of avoiding this I decided to wade through the centre of it. The show drew inspiration from many sources ranging from pre-raphaelite figure work, to local landscape, and even the graphics of my favourite computer program. It also involved some delicate 2 dimensional pattern work. The painting below (titled "finding Brueghel") was based on the composition of Brueghel's incredible "tower of babel" here it has re-imagined as a natural landform.

It turns out these fears were not well founded. It may have alienate some people (one guy really hated it) but generally the response was very good, especially from casual gallery goers. It was also satisfying to see these paintings being taken home, proving that this kind of work can find a place in the current market. For the time being I am just focusing on further developing the "straight" landscape, but at some point I will turn again to this kind of figurative work. A sketch book is already filling up.

A Stream of Creative Accidents

The art of painting is a combination of accident and intention. It's helpful to start with a vision of where I want to go, but if this vision becomes too fixed, it binds the process. An unselfconscious brush stroke can create a wonderful new effect that redirects the energy of the whole painting. Being open to this is key. If I put a dozen coins on a table, and try to arrange them in a composition that looks “right” it can be an endless task. I can spend an hour placing these coins in various patterns and non-patterns and not find this elusive goal. But if I just drop them all on the table... the resulting composition will alway look perfect. There is something “just so” about this kind of non-intentional aesthetic. Finding the balance between this and the control of a learned technique is very subtle, but I believe it is at the heart of a successful painting. There is a kind of rhythm. Hold.. let go… hold… let go... hold... let go.

Winter Painting

On a January morning, the clouds are pulling back from cold clear air out of the west. This is a view looking west from a hilltop outside of Alliston, Ontario. This painting (large 60x30 version painted in 06) was painted for an exhibition called "The Promised Land" at the Agnes Bugera Gallery in Edmonton. If you click to enlarge, you can see the dry Queen Annes Lace sticking up through the snow. For some reason this detail is my favourite part of this painting. http://www.agnesbugeragallery.com/

A Blind Alley

When a large landscape is started it presents as a set of problems in several dimensions, a flat composition, a 3D spatial puzzle, light, colour, and the problem of realizing a consistant level of naturalism. The process consists of adjusting all these elements in an effort to bring the whole into perfect balance. In my experience this effort involves creating new more subtle imbalances with each one that is resolved. Once these new imbalances are resolved, they in turn create even more subtle imbalances. It carries on like this as I feel my way toward complete balance, approaching it, but never reaching it. I think if it ever did reach a complete balance, the result would be a dead painting.

The place I prefer to be in is a place of trust where my sight does not extend beyond the next set of problems. This can be tricky as there is no guarantee of the final result. Sometimes it leads into a blind alley. This painting is such a case. It became apparent that I couldn't finish this without "shoe-horning" the elements together. After a three weeks of work it was sanded down and painted over. As every artists knows this is the most deflating experience. But, the amazing thing is, after a couple of days of sulking and making myself a nuesence to my partner, that big blank canvas starts to get exciting again.

Small Blue Landscape

This little 18x36 landscape is one of my favourites. I had worked with simple compositions like this for a long time but this one really came together.

Parts Gallery, Toronto http://www.partsgallery.ca/

Niagara Escarpment at Georgian Bay

This image was painted in late summer 2007 and exhibited in a show called The New Sublime at Art Interiors in Toronto. The process of painting this was exhilarating because of the size (8ft wide) and the challenge of creating this kind of lighting effect. The setting is east of the Niagara Escarpment, just south of Georgian Bay, looking north-west toward the setting sun. This view is from memory. Knowing the region as well I do, it has become easy to float above it in my imagination. The result is the combination of an unreal perspective on a real place.

The other challenge was looking to 19th century luminism for inspiration without becoming anachronistic. I admire American artists like Church and Bierstadt, but the sentimentality that came naturally to them grates my modern sensibility. The goal here was to create an impersonal, elemental emotion rather than a sentimental one. In this image there are no figures, no story of any kind.

The experience of painting this canvas brought my skills to a place I've been reaching toward for a long time, and the sense of possibility that comes with this brings back the excitement of first picking up the brush.

Floating World

The pictures of Hiroshige have always inspired me. They have a lightness about them. I’m not sure if ukiyo-e (floating world) refers to this sense of lightness. I have read that it refers a sensual subculture that emerged during his time. For me though "floating world" refers to the sense of weightlessness I get from Hiroshige. There is this simple joy of being and doing in everyday life. When I look at this image of people scurrying across a footbridge in the rain, I see a self sustained, self accomplished reality with no external things to fear or hope for.

A Row of Trees

North of Toronto, on the south side of the Hockley Valley, this row of trees can be seen lining an unused drive. I was on one of my drive-abouts where I take off into the countryside before dawn without a destination. On this morning, just before the sun was about to rise I saw these trees with illuminated mist filling the shallow behind them....

The scene told no story. It did not remind me of anything, and it wasn't symbolic of anything in particular. It was one of those moments where time, along with ones own storyline stops, and there is just a sense of presence. It is a quality that is hard to describe and impossible to grasp. It has something to do with the inherent value of simply being, rather than reaching or becoming. My hope in painting this was that the canvas would somehow convey this quality. It was painted in the studio from a sketch, and filled in with memory.

Intensity of Appreciation

Inspiration can be defined as the unexpected appearance of a novel idea, or vision. It can also be defined as a state of receptivity that allows for the flow of insight. But there is another factor that I think is more basic to all this. It is a special intensity of aesthetic appreciation that involves a welling-up of energy. This energy brightens and expands the whole outlook...

This spring I had a bad flu and was at one point feeling very weak. While in this state I was presented with a beautiful fresh tulip of vivid yellow. I saw that it was beautiful and felt uplifted, but from my place of exhaustion it may as well have been an old coffee cup, because the energy for appreciation just wasn't there. If I was in a healthy state, with a healthy level of energy, the beauty of that tulip would have certainly taken on a greater charge. If however I was in the heightened state of inspiration, the experience would be of a whole different order. The tulip would take on a burning intensity, a kind of resonant perfection that lights up every faculty and activates skills that are otherwise not available. There would also be an overwhelming sense of potential, and of the energy to realize that potential. I believe this is the artistic equivalent to what athletes call the "zone". It is the place were real magic can happen and where a painting can be given the spark of life.

Not painting.

There are times when getting started on a blank canvas is impossible. Today I was trying to start an 8ft by 4ft painting. This is intimidating at the best of times and requires a running start. I know what kind of picture I'm aiming for... the spirit of the thing, as well as the basic composition and flow. I even managed to get it drawn onto the warm grey gesso. But it could go no further. All the right brush strokes, the right effects, the leaps of faith that have to come together to make a painting that people will connect with. All this crowded in, piled on and felt like too much, like the energy was just not there. When the energy is not there, the studio gets invaded by life worries, business matters, or even just the noise of the street outside. The studio goes from being a sanctuary full of possibilities to a cold and empty place in the shadow of the outside world.......

Painting from Memory

I visited New Zealand in 2002 to retreat at a monastery near Wellington. My time there consisted of getting up early, having breakfast with the nuns, monks, and some fellow lay people, then sitting very still on a platform overlooking the mountains. This platform was attached to a little shelter called a "kuti" where I slept. For three weeks life was this simple routine. Some years later I decided to paint what I saw sitting on this platform. The painting that resulted is entirely from memory, so it is hard to tease apart the subject from the object, but it feels like I remember.

Natural Beauty

Within its depth I saw ingathered, and bound by love in one volume, all the scattered leaves of the Universe - Dante's Paradiso

The Fibonacci Sequence was once thought to encode the objective truth of beauty, but now for most people it is just a curiosity. The idea of any objective basis to beauty has been rejected in favour of seeing it as a subjective cultural bias. I think this reduction, at least in the absolute sense, is not true. What strikes me as harmonious and beautiful has an objective as well as a subjective component. It isn't merely in the eye of the beholder, or the beholders culture. There is also an organic fact to harmony, even the backhanded harmony of dissonance. I think this is why people never “get’ an aesthetic denying work of art on its own terms.

First Paintings

This Tulip Diptych (12x72 each) and Crucifixion (12x24) were among my first efforts at the age of sixteen. The tulips had a simple clear quality but the Crucifixion was more typical of those years, expressing fear and anxiety with surreal imagery.

Old Land

I was talking with some friends recently who have lived in Amsterdam for a number of years. When discussing art and the art scene there, the thing that strikes me is how persistent the history is, and how all-pervasive the human story . To live with so much history is very different from the Canadian experience. The basic fact of this country is still the land, where history is measured in geological time. The quartzite hills of the La Cloche range in Killarney are a formation so ancient that all the intervening human activities, from the rise of the First Nations to the birth and growth of modern cities seems very recent. When I am in Toronto, seeing it expand with cultures from all over the world, it feels like a powerful centre of gravity. But when standing on that endless shield of Precambrian rock, in an environment that is indifferent to this process, Toronto looks as temporary as a cloud. This is why I think a core Canadian art is still work that engages the reality of the land in some way. To completely forget it, is to live in a bubble.

Eclipse

I have found that the state of being inspired is a spacious one. It is spacious in terms of an open receptivity, and in a physical sense of ease. The boundary between me and my environment softens or even dissolves completely. This doesn't mean that everything loses its delineation, but that these delineations are contained within something open and trusting.

If any fear or anger arises, this openness shuts down. In the case of intense fear or anger I notice my body tensing, contracting, and my thoughts moving in tight circles around the object of concern. It's an appalling place to be. I believe this experience of closure is the source of many symbolic representations of hell. In traditional religious art from various cultures both east and west, people are often shown either frozen and immobile with fear, or trapped in a claustrophobic furnace of rage. When I enter the studio the first thing that I'm made aware of is the presence of fear or anger. If they are present nothing will get painted that day.

A Place to Walk

The Bruce Trail runs along the limestone cliffs of the Niagara Ecarpment, through forests, and among moss covered boulders. It is fragile. Being close to my home, it is the source of much of my landscape imagery.

Art and Pathology

There is a term in Buddhist psychology that is used to describe pathological states that look like healthy ones. They are called "near enemies" because they can be closely embraced as virtues. The example that is often used is equanimity and indifference, these two states can certainly look alike, but they are as different as night and day. The virtue of Equanimity involves an inner balance that is not dependent on external conditions, like the person in the lifeboat who keeps a cool head when everyone else wants to throw each other overboard. The pathology of Indifference on the other hand is a self absorbed state of not caring.

Looking at the qualities that are commonly attributed to the artistic temperament there are many such "near enemies". For example what is the difference between prolonged, single minded focus, and a having problem with perseveration? Or feeling intense, energizing inspiration and being manic? What is the difference between aspiring to something big and being grandiose? Is it inherently narcissistic to put on a show..... a solo show? It looks pretty obvious in the performing arts.

Maybe it's impossible to tease these things apart, and unnecessary. Where would computer science be without Aspergers? But I think it is helpful to try, because the romantic idea of the suffering artist is tenacious and probably based on this kind of confusion. It may give licence to a lot off unnecessary suffering by turning it into a kind of affirmation. I guess the question is; what does a single-minded interest look like when it's not perseveration? What does intense inspiration feel like when its not a manic episode?

Isolation and Intimacy

Studio life is an isolated life. It can be hard to know where you belong in the scheme of things. As you loose yourself in the work you can drift into strange places. In most workplaces there is continuous feedback from co-workers or from your employer. But in the studio it may be weeks or months between professional contact. It is strange and comforting to know these intimate paintings will have a life of their own when they leave.

Cumulonimbus Incus

As a child I spent a lot of time alone, wandering along the windbreaks that edged the big cornfields of my rural home. The spring was an exciting time because the leaden skies of winter gave way to the convective blooms of summer. Storms could be seen growing from far off. The puffs of cumulus would grow like slow motion explosions, tensing at some invisible barrier in the sky, then bursting through and up and out. If the upper reaches of the cloud were not sheared off by upper level winds it would mature into a cumulonimbus incus. Sometimes the whole thing would slowly rotate and a section of the base would drop down and curl. I knew the architecture of the sky and would follow it across the open country, watching for the storm to reach down and touch the ground. I wanted it to, and at the same time I was afraid that it just might.


Agnes Bugera Gallery, Edmonton www.agnesbugeragallery.com

The need to grow

There is a scene in the movie Finding Picasso where the artist says there are two kinds of painters, those who keep developing and those who develop to a point and stop. To loosely quote the character on the latter; “He has this little cake mould, and he bakes these little cakes. He just keeps baking these same little cakes.” That struck home, because it is easy to slip into that. There is a strong market pressure to beat a track to your own stylistic niche and stay there once the paintings begin to sell. It can reach the extreme of a painter rendering the same simple design element repeatedly to meet expectations. For years I was a cloud guy. These clouds were a joy to paint with a wet on wet technique that allowed for some real free play. But as these clouds became an important source of income, it became difficult to follow the new directions these paintings pointed to. Eventually I just pushed through and found a good reception for new work, but I can understand how you get stuck. I think a lot of artists have had that kind of experience.

New painting June 08

In this composition the cooler tones frame the gold and green mid-section. This gold/green area is both the source of light and the object illuminated. This light has been given a fluid consistency so that the trees seem immersed in it.

Brueghel, Hiroshige, and the Fallen World

The following is the artist's statement from an exhibition of symbolic work at Parts Gallery in Toronto (http://www.partsgallery.ca/ ) The post-modern sensibility of the gallery gave me the freedom to draw on many visual influences. The painting shown ("the giants" 48inx48in) represents the appearance of shadows.......

There is a peace of perfect equilibrium, that does not enter the stream of time, and looks for all the world like the nothingness of death. It is both imminent and transcendent. Closer to me than my own bones, and at the same time the distant source and destination of my life.
When I, by identifying as simple awareness, merge with this peace, life becomes like a fluctuation from equilibrium occurring within me. The arc of a life lived is seen to serve the restoration of this peace, in the same way an arc of lightening serves to restore the transparent balance of the sky. But when, because of preoccupations, I cannot identify as simple awareness, I fall from it into the world and become a thing among things. Then there is no peace except the peace of faith, in what has now become the transcendent other. That is when shadows appear.
In contemplating this I have always returned to the visions of two artists. Breughel, who’s fallen world was remote from its source, and Hiroshige, who’s radiant world had nowhere to fall.
These two visions are the personal poles I move between, and learning to hold both of them is the inspiration and subject of these paintings.