SPUTNIK!
In Russian, “sputnik” means “Satellite”, or “Fellow Traveller”. I’ve been fascinated by the story of Sputnik I since I was a little kid: this little hunk of metal and plastic that zipped around the world saying, “beep. beep. beeeeeeep…”. I also found it incredibly funny how this little tyke could be so threatening to the US political […]
PROGRESSION STUDIES
The name of this series comes from the progressive layering of thin layers of ink. I’d done a lot with progressive darkening using thin washes of translucent pigments. What I hadn’t experimented with before was thin layers of light, opaque colours. For some reason, I had this idea in my head that they’d always get really granular […]
STRANGE SEMAPHORE
Let’s get the title of this series out of the way. Jill thought they looked like the flags they use on boats, so that’s what they’re called. They’re not a secret system of signs and signals. They’re not any kind of semaphore at all, really. What they really are is an abuse of art paper. I got really interested […]
SPRING MATRICES
The word matrix means a lot of different things to different people. I know the expression from direct marketing to mean a simple x/y grid. I also know it from print-making to mean whatever is used, with ink, to hold the image that makes up the print. To the biologist, matrices are the tissues in animal […]
QUIET INSISTENCE
I can remember visiting the AGO (Art Gallery if Ontario) in my early twenties and falling in love with Agnes Martin’s paintings. Among all the big, bright, brash American art of the 60s and 70s in the contemporary galleries, one of Agnes Martin’s paintings stood out to me with a quiet insistence that still surprises me. Sometimes […]
ECHOES
“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary” – Pablo Picasso At some point, I realized that my new practice of painting every day looked a lot like what I was doing back in the late 1990s. 1998-2000 were amazing years for me. I had a new job working at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where […]
JUST PLAY
These are the words I kept telling myself when I started painting again: “Just play with the paint”. It was a way for me to overcome the pressure I put on myself every time I sat down to draw or paint something. Starting something new is often terrifying for me. It’s not just art, it’s life […]