Artist Statement |
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| Landscapes
In the fall of 2007 I had a car accident and broke my left arm. After I was operated on I was in a cast for two months. I couldn’t just sit around – I had to do something in the studio even if it was one handed. Trained as a conventional painter I remember how much fun it was doing landscape demonstrations when I taught Intro Painting. But making conventional landscapes with the body of work I have done over the last forty years was out of the question. As part of an anti Romantic polemic, I used hardware store materials such as stencils, spray cans, rollers and commercial black paint – all on unprimed canvas. For the past 15 years I have been doing frottage paintings passing a roller with black paint over a canvas with all manner of common materials, such as garden hose, clothes line and drain covers under the canvas and recording their image on the surface. The question was could I do a landscape in this context even if it was one handed with a roller? I knew I wanted subject matter that was reminiscen of this part of the world with rocks, craggy coast lines, water, stunted trees and bushes. using my familiar unprimed canvas, a roller and black paint I began. My first efforts were embarrassing. With various adjustments and making different size rollers, I began to find a way of working. No nonsense landscapes are what I was looking for. It was cold and I certainly was not going outside and make drawings. Instead I chose to be synthetic, referring to reproductions of paintings and drawings of nova Scotia of similar environs. I started by doing spare felt pen drawing of the reproductions. Using the smaller paintings as a guide, going up in scale to 48 x 48” or 48 x 55” proved to be another matter. once my parameters were established I was used to having a near foolproof method of working. this was not the case with the larger paintings and very frustrating. Only about one out of three were acceptable. this was getting dangerously close to real painting. I finally reconciled myself to a larger throw away rate. From late October 2007 until June of 2008 I produced over sixty acceptable smaller paintings but only about twenty five to thirty larger ones. |
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