< articles

a r t i c l e s :

Some random thoughts on my studio practice ...

There is a history that I come from – modernism – specifically the painters from around this area. The lesson learned from them is to use the materials to express your self. How to put a painting together and give it presence, weight, and impact. Its primarily visual. Sounds simple enough but I think this is quite rare and I am lucky to have had that education.

I have an innate kid-like desire to muck around with paint. To make things. Try it out – see where it will go. Personalizing everything – touching it all. Working out everything on the canvas by doing it. The best painting times are when I can take off the censor brakes and go where the work leads me.

Another habit is referencing other art – or maybe its more accurate to say my own sorting out of other art by filtering it through my own painting practice in a trail and error kind of way.

I have noticed how your particular situation, circumstance or environment can influence your work - and that this can be cultivated as a means of change. An example is the Emma Lake workshops. Each two week session, I noticed, somehow gets recorded in the work I do there. The work is directly related to what happens at the workshop – the people there, what they are painting, what they are talking about, the feedback etc. Somehow this all gets filtered into my work and it becomes a distinct group of paintings capturing the two week “zeitgeist”. After the workshop I can take ideas and paintings as starting points for new paintings but I have never been able to seamlessly continue working and transition from workshop to regular life. The workshops of 2000 onwards in partcular have had a big impact on me.

A more specific example is my out of town studio. I drive out there through all seasons and notice the changing landscape, colours and things like weathered buildings, curves and dips in the highway, traffic signs, grid roads crossing, stop signs blacked out by a setting sun, dusk. These things all seeped into my paintings and were reflected in a couple of shows (“Off the grid” and “Cross Section” both in 2008). It would be crazy if this didn’t effect my work. I’ve often thought that I’m the kind of person who if you came in and painted one of my studio walls blue that sooner or later I would start taking that into account in my work – (I’d either paint blue paintings or ones that looked good on blue or somehow absorb “blue” into my work). Sounds obvious – but in a sense every conversation you have effects you in that way – every show you see. Anything that grabs your mind and sinks in. And often its not overtly grabbing your mind – its more “out the corner of your eye”. Intuition. What seems right – rather than what is justifiably theoretically provable as being right (yuk!).

Then there are the visual ideas that morph into new possibilities – which has to do with having a creative visual mind. A vertical pillar becomes a curving road which becomes a figure. Or a painting like “Focus” triggers an idea about folding over the corner of paper – and once I’m lost in the work it triggers childhood memories of folding newspapers and floating them on a pond.

A painting like "paper hat" is a formal abstraction, a technical curiosity, a whimsical image, an acknowledgment of painterly ancestors, a reference to childhood memories, and a nod to family disappointments and unfulfilled hopes. A happy but poignant painting to me. These ideas inform the work in “Power Play” at my recent show at Michael Gibson Gallery. (The title was trying to get at the idea that I play in the studio – try things out – but at the same time its “serious” play – or constructive play).

But rectangles are supposed to be cold and anonymous aren’t they? How can they be personal? An example I have used is my son and his obsession with juggling a soccer ball. When he was 10 or 11 he started playing soccer. He stuck with it and he started doing this juggling (kicking a ball up and down and doing “moves” as the ball is in the air). He kept doing it and over the years he got very good at it. I started looking at the very simple act of kicking a ball – how it somehow acted as a bench mark or consistent reference point as he went through a number of life issues in his teenage years. 6 or 7 years of doing that - so now when he juggles there’s an explicit and implicit act - on the one hand he’s just kicking the ball – on the other hand that ball has somehow has been personalized and has become meaningful - containing his life experience – highs and lows – successes and failures. That’s abstraction!

Sometimes very simple observations can be used as starting points. On a recent trip out east I visited Ric Evans’ studio. Walking to a close by gallery we started talking about visual cues for paintings – the repetitive break in the side walk concrete, the length of a stride, some kids artwork on a playground wall across the street. It was all there and completely valid and real.

Trouble is – all of these things don’t guarantee a painting that visually moves you. They give a back story but this has to be meshed with the act of making a painting – a visual object that somehow captures an aesthetic moment – and that can re-communicate that aesthetic moment back to the viewer. Hopefully it does contain the emotional force of that back story if not its literal depiction.

Life -> studio -> painting -> life -> studio -> painting -> life -> studio -> painting ...

Jonathan, April 2009