Art at harbourfront

Saw this piece by Marigold Santos on the weekend, terrific stuff.

I chose to load this pic as Annie kept getting in the way of the other painting.

Very large and engaging work.

The show is called other worlds, all the work is strong.

A Thousand Cuts

This is a painting from April of this year, I made a couple in this series as part of my RBC paintting entry.

They weave historical and personal elements together. The surface of Birch wood panel becomes part of the piece and I was thinking of the school tables I used to draw on in grade 5, scrawling LED ZEP, STONES and AC/DC in deep HB pencil, until I was caught and had to clean 40+ tables after school.

Here are some thoughts I had about it at the time: 

This plain white business shirt, is a memento of a personal violence against me, at times I re-interpret my memories, re investigate them as a victim, as a villian and as a participant, but what is truth, that has long seemed to shift away to emotional response.

I am fascinated by the subjective nature of truth, memory, how history itself is a collective memory constantly being updated and changed, restored and changed again by the participants and the interpreters.

This piece, A Thousand Cuts, has many different tensions and contradictions contained within it. The title itself can mean the ancient chinese torture, as evident by the destruction of this garment, or it could be something more mundane and bureaucratic.

The painting itself is static but the lines of the piece have a nervous care and detail style to them. , indicates a fullness, the lines seem been painted in intense style, the business shirt lies in tatters, it can suggest an end to a paternalistic system, echoed by the figure in the background or it can be more nuianced.

There is a tension in the piece, the business shirt, a symbol of something highly functioning is broken down. The symbol of something quintessintially masculine has a femenine shape to it. 

There is a tension between the figure in the background, perhaps one who would wear a shirt like this, the destroyed shirt and the confrontational way the figure gazes to the viewer.  

Painted in 1994

There is so much I can say about the subject of this portrait. So much in fact, I'll say nothing.

The canvas was made at a time I was really broke, I sewed several pieces together, and gesso'd it heavily.

If memory serves, I was savaged in my class critique. I was interested in colours and textures and from here I moved in to really subtle toned paintings- I guess some of the last of my figure work before painting empty spaces.

Hey! a great review in NOW magazine for my current Loop show. You can read it, NOW Thanks to everyone who has supported me with getting this show ready, and opening on time. Thanks for the support from my Sarah and our baby sitting Grandma/Meme team and the copious amounts of Coffee from Jet Fuel and Rooster.

Self portraits

Looking up from my kitchen table at the studio I was confronted with these two self portraits, I put the second one there to get out of the way of cleaning this week and did not really think about these 2, side by side- tucked in the frame of a queen portrait, you can see the details in her dress.

They are both pretty sombre, the one on the right was done in silver point on toned paper in 1994, the one on the left looks like 2007 in a perhaps not too happy a mood.

Next stage

Well dropped a whack of paintings at the framers, I am looking forward to getting those back, it's amazing to see your work transformed somewhat by the frame.

Getting ready for the artist project- Holla!

here is a little study from today:

Agonizing

Anyone who knows me, knows that I really cannot stand star wars, Lucas etc

But I have been working on this painting of Bobba Fett for the last little bit, Cripes it's one fine detail after another!

Painting studies continue

I have held on to these weird head sculpts for years, I got them in a trade with this psycho bastard who would want these toy parts for some weird thing he was doing with star wars or some shit. I would make the trade with him with hopes of re-configuring my old broken down GIJoes but it was never worth it as he would bring up the whole thing at a party or a bar when I was talking to a group of ladies. Total nerd-bot.

Paintings from this summer

Forgot all about these three 12x12 inch paintings from the AWOL square foot show.

Yes the work in that things ranges from artwork to insane crap, but hey, it was nice to have a deadline.

This centaur seems to keep resurfacing in this body of work, he is something of my totem animal- a mascot but also something that is a representation of the animalistic desires within people.

There is a certain sense of innocence that I was playing with here, somewhere between Darger and Disney.

Here is a little Darger, not a Dzama

But you can see how much Marcel Dzama studied the decrepit borderline pedo.

I just googled images of Disney and everything that came up for about 17 pages was computer generated, the images look so dead, not surprising I guess- but poor Ariel, she must so disheartened with nothing but her Dinglehopper to console her.

I have been using the image of trees and cameos. I feel that cameos are such an ancient and potent image of women. There is something so special about that.

Trees: old trees, trees of knowledge- what that knowledge means and do you really want that knowledge? Perhaps leaving well enough alone may be in our best interests at times.

Botticelli and the Mystic Nativity

I happened to catch a few minutes of this BBC series last night on TVO, (props to the government funded arts acronyms!) its called The Private life of {insert artwork or artist here} they featured one on Botticelli's Mystic Nativity which is in the National Gallery in London. It seemed like the history of the painting is really rich and incorporates the history of Florence in the turbulent times after the Bonfire of the vanities and Savonarola being burned as a heretic.

I have always looked at this image with a lot of care when I was spending time in the gallery, the demons which peak out of the cracks of the earth are fascinating and I love how Botticelli thought the world was coming to an end in 1500 AD because all the problems in Italy at that time. I had a huge chat with my friend Jan years ago and I used this painting as an example of how we always think things are getting worse in life, no matter what the evidence, we think we live at the end of days as it were.

As per usual, she thought I was full of shit and thought it best to let me know, another reason why we all miss Jan- daily.

I digress.

Anyways, when I was a student in Florence back in 1992, I was really into the compositional poetry of the large paintings in the Ufizi galleries there. I went so far as to base a painting of mine on Botticelli's Primavera....However my painting was based on a series of disturbing dreams I was having at the time about US POWs after Viet Nam (wow, i am outdoing myself on the acronyms ce soir!)

man, another picture I do not have a slide of, 20 years ago, I have to see if I can find any reference to that painting of mine and I'll insert it here at some point.
Yup, I remember it well, these Pows had the attributes of 1970s men, moustaches and such, as it turns out Freddie Mercury died at that time and he really resembled one of my characters, or visa versa.


Back to the topic, the Nativity painting, it is really strange and wonderful and makes reference to a speech by Savonarola and his visions of Mary (Click here if you would like to know more about this Dominican friar).

Boy did this drag on, anyways look, I could not fins the doc on youtube but I found others on the series here, look at the sidebar for ones on Van Gogh, Michelangelo, Degas, Picasso, Rodin and the Japanese artist Hokusai of the wave painting, of which I will shamelessly insert my own version of that image as part of my mixed media painting/photography.

The TV series shows you an image in a different light, ok, they don't examine contemporary work which would be awesome but what can I tell you?

Please have a look at the National Gallery UK's site the collection is terrific, there is so much stunning work there, every time i am in the UK, I walk in that gallery and it feels like I am visiting a relative, I'll spend the day there.

Finally organized a shoot at the Studio

Took some time in the studio for this little portrait of Scotty. I have had this seamless around for awhile and I tend to use it more in lengths for painting more stark white paintings on black. For the purpose of painting, its fine, i staple it to the wall and it goes flat. But damn, it needs a ton of help as a backdrop. For these quick prints I did not bother, but I have to blur the background in Photoshop to get the cellulite texture out of the thing. Argh.

Anyways, Scotty came in with this ochre coloured zip up and this seemed like just the right colour mix, the blacks, ochres and browns of coffee on his jeans.

I was trying out these Kino flo knock off constant lights and I have to say I was really happy with the quality of the light, they are neat, 4 independently operated lights in each unit with barn yard doors, not to be a geek but they were cool, and not too heavy.

The fall off of light here is pretty dramatic and I like that a lot. It reminds me of 16th century full length Spanish paintings, not to draw any parallels between this hastily shot image of Scotty and the meticulous work of Diego Velazquez.

Nor am I trying to compare the actor Montgomery Clift like handsomeness of Scotty with famous the deformed lipped royalty of the Hapsburgs, whose portraits by Velazquez and others, now after 300+ years are just a testament to their mad money, vanity and mostly their weird looks.

This Hapsburg ain't the weirdest looker that is for sure but they got 'em.

But seriously, they looked crazy. I remember walking through the Art History Museum in Vienna and being just amused at the heroic portraits of the most inbred and fantastically ugly (and wealthy) people ever. I looked it up online but could not find anything, I have the catalogue for the Kunsthistoriches Museum so I'll put something up when I have a chance to scan the book.

working sketches

working in the sketchbook on some ideas for an upcoming show at Loop. Here are just a few of the things I'm playing with at the moment.





These sketches are my thoughts and creating the type of short hand that my new work will come out of in the next few weeks. With these pictures, I was thinking of British-Portuguese artist, Paula Rego. Her work about childhood and her handling of materials is always an inspiration.




On a totally different note, when I was in the market on Sunday I painted a few small sketches in watercolour of people, this is one of them. This guy gives a tango show, I won't bore you with the details, but he starts the music people all come together and then nothing happens for awhile and everyone leaves, or sometimes he dances, hard to figure out the reason.

Plaza de Mayo

With my days in Buenos Aires winding down, I headed to the main square to do some painting. This place is known for protests but not much was going on this day, I think it was a Sunday? Anyways, instead of a protest there were a group of people shooting some sort of revolutionary recreation type thing for TV. Go figure.



If you look on the left hand side of the image, you see the television crew: far left in red is the make-up girl who asked me about immigrating to Canada and if she should go to Montreal; some crew members; the actor is the guy with the outstretched arm and beard; to the right of that the camera person with a 5D and an old lens and sound.

To the right of all that is a group of American tourists who were sitting in the park (actually my starting point, worked the other way across the page) the tourists were de rigueur annoying in the way you expect people to be, lame comments about the city and a insane allegiance to an overuse of the words 'like' and 'dude'.

As an aside, I have to admit that the Moleskine Watercolor Sketchbook has been really terrific for me for the past year: Cuba, Morocco and now Buenos Aires, the paper is great which has been what has been lacking with other Moleskine products for 'arty' pursuits. At some point I will upload these really crude (read rudimentary) paintings I did in Cuba which sort of got me started on this style of character depiction with watercolours.

Buenos Aires - Watercolour

These are a few of some recent watercolour sketches I made while in Buenos Aires over the holidays. We went to the horse track, the Hippodromo to be exact. These Jockeys had incredible satin outfits and I had about a minute to paint them before they go on their horses and took off. I was taking a picture of these Jockeys and guards stopped me-saying no photos. I pulled out my watercolour set and started to work.



This is one of the riders as they prepared for a race. This guy is the second person in on the watercolour above- with one minute to work with, they are more of a suggestion than a painting. This was Dec 31st, it was 20 +C in Buenos Aires, just a great day, not to mention we bet on the last race of the day and won!



I sat in a little coffee shop near the Once district and watched people go about their week day, slowly painting this over the course of probably an hour, watching the changes in the end of day traffic.

The girl who is in the lower right corner of this painting is part of a group of people who collect all the cardboard and bottles in Buenos Aires, they go by the name cartoneros,. Mostly it is gruff weathered bachelors who push these immense nylon bags on rollers around town but this girl was part of a family who were scavenging. She stopped for a moment and looked around. I would have liked to follow these groups of people around and get to know who their life is, and I'm sure it ain't easy. There story is I'm sure about the suffering lower income people have suffered since the economic collapse.

Anyways, more paintings to follow.

Automatic Television Portraits

While staying in this hotel room, i actually have a TV for once. To clarify- there is nothing on TV worth watch, NOTHING.


Having said that, I noticed these two southerners being interviewed last night. On the right, Jimmy Carter who was on the CBC show, The Hour with George. Still articulate, he talked about a bunch of other things. On the left, Dolly Parton, who was on this show that has not changed since the 80s and has these weird production values- i thought it was from the 80s (Dolly does not age) till they started talking about Julie&Julia with Meryl Streep. . These sketches were made from the moving images while lying in a king size bed.

William Kentridge

This is a South African artist who is I guess a draughtsman who films his ever changing charcoal drawings and creates incredible films from them (shot on the same sheet of paper). I believe I watched this one in Chicago in 1997 and since I was just there, here is that film. Much of Kentridge's work relates to Apartheid and the treatment of people, there are always modern articles in his work (telephones and other office objects figure prominently) and the stripe suited businessman is always a main character. The fragility of the human is seen again and again.

Obviously the title is taken from the bible's story of Belshazzar's Feast, the hand writes these words on the wall of his palace and Belshazzar is dead by morning.

There is a beautiful painting of this in the National Gallery in London, UK. The Rembrandt painting is just a literal visual of this biblical tale-although it is a fantastic portrayal of these events.



To be honest though, when I am in the Rembrandt room, I look at his young self portrait: haughty, full of expectation and then you walk into the other room where one of his last self portraits hangs- he looks absolutely at the viewer with honesty and no pretensions.





please check out the National Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago

Some More Older Paintings...

This is some older paintings that I found in the back of the hard drive-this was when I was obsessed with GIJoes of the 1970s.

At the time, I was just taken by the way these toys all looked similar but maintained an individuality due to what 'life' had exposed them to, despite having come from the same mold.

Incidently, for those who are unfamiliar with my work or not equally obsessed with GIJoes or Action Man figures of the 60s and 70s,you may find this stuff unlike the GIJoes you know. Yes, this bears no resemblance to the 80s, GIJoes and the real american hero schtick. In fact, as a kid, i did not understand how my figures disappeared, these amazing adventure team guys who would capture the pygmy gorilla, or the albino tiger, or discover the mummy- yes, those adventure team members! How did they disappear during the OPEC oil crisis and re-emerge, a few years later as 3" characters who all appeared to have been rejected from a village people toy tie in.



If you want to see more of these images please go to ericfarache.com and click on tickle trunk, you'll see plenty of images both painting and sculpture. My GIJOE studies are in the sketchbook area.