The Annotated Workspace

Who says an artist needs a big studio? When your paintings are no bigger than a trade size paperback, an old desk will do.

Things were getting a little cramped the other day, I recorded the chaos before I cleaned it up.

1- Vintage seventies clock (Westclox Minicube) from a thrift store in Sidney, B.C.. Just started making a bad noise.

2- Bill reminders and a calendar page with notes such as the one for September 13th: ‘4:30 am fight outside!’

3- My palette, watered down in old baby food jars with yogurt container mixing lids. Clockwise from top: Liquitex cadmium yellow deep; Liquitex mars black; Liquitex cobalt blue; Liquitex brilliant blue; Stevenson permanent crimson and Liquitex cadmium red medium.

4- More yogurt containers for colour mixing all of which are in various stages of UV disintegration.

5- Hama daylight slide viewer, dropped innumerable times, fixed with tape and cardboard and made shiny by sixteen years of handling.

6- Piece of recycled Gibson Girl Design order form that I use for guiding my straight edges. Gibson Girl was my girlfriend Hayley’s tailoring business which I encouraged her to give up after I saw how badly her customers treated her! Discourage anyone you love from going into the tailoring business.

7- Mamiya 645e, 6 X 4.5 cm, 120 film camera which I use, with tungsten slide film, to take the record shots of my paintings. Should probably have bought a 4 X 5” view camera.

8- Ikea lamp with replaced socket base and 60 watt ‘daylight’ bulb. Illuminates the painting and the slide viewer. Good hand warmer in winter.

9- The current painting ‘Pizza’ (on Strathmore illustration board) at a very early stage. Covered with tracing paper to protect its surface while I paint.

10- Canon digital camera owned by Hayley’s new company ‘Birds of North America’, a line of women’s clothes for which I shoot the look books. I was using the camera to shoot my daily progress on ‘Pizza’ but missed a day and gave up the project. Argh!! Maybe next time!

11- Plywood box which protected my paintings from the rigours of air and bus travel for many years as I traipsed across the continent in search of a home for my paintings. Now retired.

12- Letter from the National Gallery of Canada responding a year and a half after I sent them notice of my second show in New York. After apologizing for the delay in responding, they tell me they will not be pursuing an acquisition of my work at this time. Thanks!

13- Sheet, furnished by Hayley, with helpful French language grammar tips.

14- Perpetual calendar which is perpetually at least one day off.

15- Prize UPS pen (stylus on one end, pen on the other) found on the street. Assorted seventies pencils (Census of Canada, Wawanesa Insurance) and homemade ‘pick’ (pin stuck in to quarter inch dowel) for poking unruly, elevated bits on the paintings.

16- Old mug with broken handle and yogurt container insert holding my ‘fresh’ water. No wonder my colours are so muddy!

17- Sheet of tracing paper to rest my hand on while painting. A fresh one for each painting!

18- Cheap number 6 Winsor and Newton Brush. Almost a year old, due for changing. The only size brush I use. I Always cut the floppy tip off the new one. Note that I’ve worn the chrome off the ferrule. Probably have microscopic particles of chrome in my bloodstream.

19- Folded piece of paper towel for absorbing water from the brush or dabbing excess paint from the painting.

20- Sixties green metal office desk originally from the University of Victoria in B.C. which has been taken apart and moved too many times to count. Even in pieces, it is astonishingly heavy!

21- Sixties metal office chair ‘40/4’ designed by David Rowland with original under-seat sticker. This chair, combined with the desk, makes for a chilly winter painting experience.

22- Vintage leaf coaster which I never seem to use but always have on my desk.

23- Take-out coffee (not on coaster) from Depanneur Le Pick Up, our awesome local store/ lunch counter.

24- Instructions for new power cord for our internet connection from Bell. ‘Unplug old power cord, plug in new power cord’ and a phone number to call in the event the instructions aren’t clear enough.

25- Remote control for radio, handy for changing the station when Jian Ghomeshi on CBC Radio-One becomes too much to bear.

26- My new-old glasses. According to the vendor in New York, made for 1950’s chemical workers. Got glasses just in time for our cross country drive to Montreal. ‘Wow, the street signs are so clear!’

27- Pin-back buttons bearing the logo I designed for ‘Birds of North America’ sent to us by an enterprising button maker. Too bad he screwed up the logo!

28- Spray bottle for keeping ‘Tony’ our demented cat from destroying our new couches. Good boy.

29- Montreal ‘Metro’ tickets under a copy of Michel Tremblay’s ‘ The Fat Lady Next Door is Pregnant’, in French no less! I’ve struggled through the first page.

30- Entertaining letter from my wildly perceptive, intelligent and equally crazy ex-wife.

31- Beautiful Italian metal box containing odds and ends given to me by a friend in Victoria for helping trim her bush. No, really, a really big hedge. Really big.

Refueling

City Water Meter Repair Co. Inc. 2008, 5.5 X 8", acrylic on paper.

The bus driver announced, as we were approaching the Albany N.Y. bus terminal on the way home to Montreal, that we’d be refueling the bus in Albany and stopping for food after another half hour on the highway.

He advised against eating at the Albany terminal saying he wouldn’t let his dog eat there. As the next food stop was scheduled to be at a McDonald’s I decided it wouldn’t kill me to go 10 hours without food.

The cajoling and herding of bus travel, the close proximity to people making odd noises and trying all manner of things to thwart the evil of deep vein thrombosis had almost completely overwhelmed the positive buzz of a few days in New York.

I thought when I moved to Montreal that I’d be in New York at least a few days a year but this was my first trip since the move. For me, it’s never hard to think of a reason why I shouldn’t do something. I finally came up with several compelling reasons to go and pulled the trigger on a trip.

My Montreal artist friend Randall Anderson was going down to de-install his latest project, a sculpture in a storage locker in Chelsea. An Internet friend, Adam Normandin, had a show of his realist work at George Billis Gallery and a far-flung group of photorealists who found me on facebook were arranging to meet for a gallery tour.

I had my doubts. I’m at a place where I’m a little confused about what I do. These mostly young photorealists appeared to be a gung-ho bunch and I was afraid of contaminating their enthusiasm with my growing distaste for the genre.

The trip however, became a lesson in refueling. It was interesting and affirming to see artists at all points in their careers becoming recharged from new ideas and the shared struggle of making art.

Recognizing each other from our tiny facebook profile pictures we greeted each other like long lost friends although our only acquaintance was from scant lines of information on the internet.

New York can be overwhelming for an artist. Chelsea is full of spectacle, the new, the novel. The soaring spaces often outshining the art.

But something always manages to touch the heart: Randall cheekily working the perimeter of the mainstream art world with his Manhattan Mini Storage installation ‘Chelsea Prototype’; My friend Jay Kelly’s obsessively created small abstract drawings at Jim Kempner; At Pavel Zoubok, John Evans’ one-a-day collages which for decades chronicled the concerns of his East Village neighbourhood through found bits and pieces.

This latter helped underline for me the importance of one’s work being about what one knows best.

For the first time in eight years of trips to New York, I came home without a single photo that I’d turn into a painting. It suddenly didn’t make any sense for me to even partially focus on the imagery of a city I know only through infrequent visits.

A week later we’re all back home and judging by the facebook postings, most are full of the excitement of new techniques to try, new art world connections, new art discovered and a few more of New York’s mysteries unfurled.

I’ve struggled through a week of post hangover, post nine hour bus trip blahs and look forward to starting a new week with at least enough gas to get me through my next painting.

New Painting: 'Apartment on Convent Place'

'Apartment on Convent Place' 2009, 5.5 X 8", acrylic on board.

I had originally wanted to shoot this building from the front where the word ‘Maple’ appeared on one of the front doors in plain, vaguely italic, gold leaf letters. The other door must have read ‘Apts’ or ‘Court’ but had been replaced. By the time I got around to shooting it, ‘Maple’ had also disappeared.

I had been intent on calling the piece ‘Maple’ and the missing word killed my interest in the building. Just another worn looking small stucco apartment in Victoria. The narrow street wouldn’t allow me to fit the whole building in my viewfinder so I left without a photo.

Some time later, overlooking a carport, I took a shot of the back of the building not realising it was ‘Maple’.

We’re settling in to Montreal but I’m still dragging out my most recent Victoria slides to browse through. Old slides have a diminishing impact on me over time, reflecting old concerns or conceits. There seems to be a two year window of relevance which I can feel closing on my Victoria shots.

I notice John Salt and John Baeder often use old photos for new paintings and wonder if I’ll ever do the same.

The changing nature of what surrounds us interests me. The changes giving new context to the old. The constantly shifting definition of ‘old’. I guess using old photos is one way of pointing out these changes.

God knows why I picked this image out of the pile. Like most, it sort of demanded that I choose it. I sometimes find myself mid-painting asking ‘Why on earth am I painting this?’ Nondescript is hardly the word but it undoubtedly reflects some subtle perceptual change in me and illuminates some dark corner of my psyche with its weak light.

What’s the Point?

'Louise Apartments' 2008, 5.5 X 8", acrylic on paper

A question photorealists are often asked and in the silence of approaching darkness on our deserted street, a question I ask myself too frequently about a good many things.

With regards to making a painting from a photograph I can only say that it’s the best way I’ve found to express myself as an artist.

In an age when the definition of art is so broad I’m shocked that knowledgeable people still question the validity of photo-based paintings, giving it only the most superficial analysis.

At my second show of photorealist work in Toronto the first conversation I had on opening night was of the ‘what’s the point’ variety. It still galls me that the man with the question was a successful painter at the gallery who dismissively told me he could produce something similar to my paintings with photoshop and a printer.

By the time I had finished defending myself I was emotionally spent and not much looking forward to the rest of the evening. When I learned he was a ‘stable-mate’ I could have done the little bastard some physical harm!

It’s not always easy being the only photorealist at a gallery.

I don’t often meet the people who buy my paintings but at my last show I spoke with someone who had just purchased ‘Louise Apartments’ and was at a loss to explain why the image affected him to the degree it did.

The loss of words, his stock in trade as an English professor, gave me a feeling of task-completed. I detailed for him, as best I could, the initial encounter I had with the subject: camera in hand, a feeling in the stomach that is akin to dread or despair, to hearing that the news is as bad as you thought it might be.

The point of the whole excruciating exercise being something beyond words or description.

Shipping

In my continuing effort to expose the minutiae of my painting practice, here are a few words and a small movie on shipping.

Equal to my hatred for framing is my hatred of crate assembly.

I tell myself that I wouldn’t hate it so much if I had a workshop but I once had a workshop and hated it just as much. Perhaps the shop’s small size was the issue, I couldn’t move an eight foot piece of wood without knocking things off shelves or gouging walls.


(music: I Guess I'm Floating-M83)

For someone as detail oriented as me I have the darnedest time with tape measures. The old adage of ‘measure twice and cut once’ is no guarantee of success. Power tools and an amped-up level of frustration aren’t a good mix.

A huge part of the stress of shipping is the possibility of the complete destruction of one’s paintings. Covering an obsessively created work of art with a thin layer of glass for its ‘protection’ for a cross continental trip is a little counterintuitive but things can be done to lessen the chance of disaster.

Using blue painter’s tape (made by 3M) I cover the glass with a grid which, in the event of breakage, is meant to hold any broken bits of glass in place until they can be dealt with. The glass is supported somewhat by the mat board surrounding the painting so the unsupported area is quite small. Incidentally, the green versions of this tape leave adhesive on the glass after a short period.

I’ve managed not to break any glass in ten years of long distance shipping so the inherent danger might be less than it would appear.

I wrap the framed painting in a plastic bag, making it as water tight as I can.

Bubble wrap is my best friend. I could be accused of overusing it but anything wrapped in a sufficient amount of bubble wrap will survive all but the most catastrophic incidents. I once used 150 feet of bubble wrap to send a crate with fifteen paintings to New York from British Columbia ...and they survived.

It wasn’t the most efficiently assembled package I’ve ever shipped.

I buy one inch bubble wrap in two hundred foot rolls. The last roll I purchased I had to strap to the roof of my miata, dwarfing the car. All that was missing was a ‘follow me to the circus’ sign taped to the bumper. The salesperson at the store said that if it fell off the car at least no one would get hurt!

The crates themselves are made of quarter-inch plywood attached to external frames of one-by-two strapping. I use drywall screws to hold it all together

When I send a single framed painting I make the sides of the crate with one-by-fours topped with quarter-inch sheets of plywood.

I seal all the edges with packing tape, address it and hope for the best.

My friend Steve Donahue shared with me the unique method he once employed as a UPS driver on the graveyard shift in Toledo, Ohio. Being somewhat anti-authority, Steve, annoyed by the supervisors checking out his adherence to the standard ‘how-to-pack-a-truck’ policy preferred to build a well constructed false wall and pitch all the remaining boxes into the darkness beyond! He gave special attention to boxes marked ‘Fragile’.

Unfortunately, he shared this on the eve of the shipment to New York of my first show at O.K. Harris: twenty thousand dollars worth of glass covered paintings, representing half a dozen years of work, awaiting the arrival of the distinctive brown UPS truck!

Perfection

Maybe today will be perfect.

This means I will begin painting at 9 am, I’ll stop at noon for lunch, I’ll continue painting at 12:30 pm and stop again at 5 pm.

No one will call. No one will need me. I won’t need to make an appointment to get my summer tires installed or notice the tiny burgeoning of a recurrence of skin cancer on my forearm.

I’ll be so seduced by the desire to make something perfect that I won’t notice the inanities of the radio blaring in the background.

One of the reasons I turned to photorealism was the temptation of perfection.

If I make the painting look just like the photograph I used as a source then I have, objectively, achieved one of the things I had set out to do.

You may not like what I painted or why or how I painted it but you sure as hell can’t tell me it doesn’t look like a photograph.


(Camrose Apartments, 2005 5.5 X 8" acrylic on paper)

When you’re insecure or unaware of what you’re saying in your paintings it’s easy to become bogged down by the pursuit of perfection.

Perfection is an illusion. The siren song that lures me from the realities of my existence.

After my second sold out show in New York a noted authority on photorealism called my work that of ‘a fine journeyman realist’.

Ouch! After all, the sold out show wasn’t at his gallery.

I’m beginning to understand that the pursuit of perfection is an unsuccessful effort to eliminate any possibility of rejection and at the same time a denial of the humanity in my paintings.

My eyes, my brain and my hands work together in their own unique way. The imperfections are what make the works unique to me.

I’m human and I cannot be perfect. Repeat as needed.

The Subject

What do I paint?

I used to ask myself this before starting a painting. I’d go through slides of my recent work and remind myself what it was that I painted.

I think it’s one of the harder things for a photorealist to consider, we’re defined so much by the things we paint. I’ve ended up being more enamoured of painters who aren’t as easily defined by their subject matter. How do you describe what Robert Bechtle or John Salt paints?


(Martin's Bar, 2006 5.5 X 8" acrylic on paper)

When I dropped old neon signs as a subject I had only vague stirrings of awareness of the direction I was headed. The conscious changes one makes are usually dead ends. There is often an undercurrent of change that’s more elusive but more important to identify.

How do you carve out an identity as an artist without figuring out who you are as a person? I am singularly unmoved by paintings of marbles, random objects in glass jars, the still life of vintage collectibles.

What do these things say about one’s soul? Not much.

When I look at a painting, I want to be let in through a crack to the artist’s psyche, not to simply marvel at their technical bravado.

Far more difficult than the mastery of technique is the seeming endlessness of the artist sorting out why he paints. Why he paints what he paints.

For the photorealist, it’s worth considering why one chooses to be a photorealist at all. Why would a sane person do that to themselves?

I don’t know that it’s ultimately necessary to have this knowledge but I know that it’s important to ask these questions of oneself and to answer them truthfully.

The questions never change but for me, the answers continue to morph and shift in unexpected ways.

What do I paint?

If I’m figuring anything out, I’m painting an honest reflection of myself.

(Running Man, 2006 8 X 5.5" acrylic on paper)