New Painting: 'House on De Brebeuf'

House on De Brebeuf, 2010 5.5 X 8" acrylic on illustration board

‘House on De Bebeuf’ took me through the bulk of our second Montreal winter. Three hundred and three hours spread over nine or ten weeks. The little house is the only one I photographed in our old unlamented neighbourhood. An anomalous one story building amongst the rickety exterior staircases of the taller duplexes and triplexes that typify the ‘Plateau’.

Winter was easier this year. Our first one in ‘Petite Italie’. The neighbourhood is less frantic than our last which was an uneasy mixture of older, low income renters and flat-screen-hdtv, stainless-steel-appliance-loving, nouveaux bourgeois. This is a strangely calm part of the city with a remarkable array of people from all social strata quietly going about their business. On the weekend when the car shops and meat packers are closed it’s positively sublime.

For the first time I managed to complete a time-lapse video project of the painting process. I knew I’d have to mount the tripod on my desk in order not to forget to take the photos. I averaged three shots a day. It’s easier to understand why the paintings take so long when the video appears to bog down as the brick areas are painted or when the intricate background railings are being sharpened.

I felt a great sense of relief when this painting was done. The video was an added burden that I tired of quickly but was determined to see through.

Something that would complete my bare-it-all painting process, aside from a 24/7 live video feed, would be little notations on my time sheets to explain why I missed several hours of one day or another day altogether. This would complete the picture of process-as-art. The days that I wanted to crawl into a cave and die are surely not irrelevant to the understanding of the work but this facet only exists if I share it.

I have a fundamental desire to leave a mark of my existence that will extend beyond whatever years I have left. Classic mortality complex. I grew up with a profound feeling of powerlessness and invisibility and have a need to leave some trace or proof of my having existed.

The paintings are seed being sown. The gallery, the blog, the videos, the web-site are the cultivation. The crop being harvested is me.

Q & A: 'Poets and Artists'

I was asked to provide answers to a few interview questions by Poets and Artists magazine recently. While I think all the time about my systems, it’s hard to commit it to words. I rewrote the answers several times before I felt even vaguely satisfied.

I find writing, like art, is a process of getting to one’s truth. In the first draft I embellish, prevaricate and generally hide behind a glib or amusing front. A need for acceptance drives this behaviour but it doesn’t make for good writing.

I present this side to the outside world. The other side, exposed to but a few, is truly cutting and opinionated.

In the second draft, I hack and slash the words that dull the points I’m making or that make what I’m doing seem trivial. The more time that passes between drafts, the easier it is to see the culprits.

Here is the interview as it appears in the magazine. I’ve refrained from doing another round of editing!

Short bio written in third person.

Montreal based painter Neil MacCormick’s obsessively created small scale photorealist works, reflecting the artist’s concerns with identity and alienation, have garnered an eager audience resulting in consecutive sold out shows at the prestigious O.K. Harris Works of Art in New York.

MacCormick, a self taught artist, was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1958. His work has also shown at galleries in Toronto, Vancouver, B.C. and Victoria B.C. where he lived for almost twenty years.

Artist statement.

Photorealism offers me the illusion of objectivity, the removal of self.

In reality, my paintings are a conduit through which I subconsciously express an almost indefinable ache with the unique marks I make.

Do you have a ritual you follow before each new work is started?

I hate to think of it as a ritual, per se, but I often go through a period of listlessness or anxiety between paintings.

This period of a week or so between the end of one painting and the beginning of another has to do with the intense and protracted level of concentration that each piece requires and the absence of a feeling of usefulness that painting gives me.

What do you hope art historians will say about your work 300 years from now?

I try to make the unique experiences of my life into art that transcends the intensely personal to become universally representative of the human condition.

I can honestly say that the opinions of art historians aren’t something I care about.

What are you working on next?

I’m several weeks in to the next project ‘House on De Brebeuf’ a small painting of a small nondescript house in Montreal.

Entering my second year of life in Montreal, I’ve begun focussing on more local subject matter as the city seeps into my veins and I begin to see myself reflected in its brand of structure and roadside iconography.

What is your hidden talent (something not related to art)?

Due to my fanatical desire to uproot the sources of my own issues and ideas I have developed an ability to help people see through the tangle of their own psychological undergrowth. This is something I feel is enormously helpful in creative pursuits.

I also write and cut hair.

What medium have you not used in the past that you may wish to try out?

I live in an area of Montreal which is replete with auto body shops and I’ve begun collecting discarded metal fenders and other painted car panels for a project not entirely unrelated to painting but definitely outside of my normal practice.

It may take years to complete the first piece but I’m not averse to long term goals!

Explain your process.

My process begins with a single slide taken by a 35 mm SLR camera. The slide is projected on to paper or illustration board using a thrift store projector. The image is traced with a 5H pencil in a relatively loose manner. This process usually takes two hours.

The paintings are done with five watered down acrylic colours and one inexpensive #6 gold sable brush, in a modified watercolour/dry-brush technique using only the white of the paper to provide highlights. I adhere as closely as I can to the visual information provided by the slide.

I paint from background to foreground slowly building colour saturation using washes, crosshatches and stipples. I complete each small section before moving on. Aside from the area being painted, the painting is covered by a protective layer of tracing paper.

I refer to the slide in a small hand held daylight viewer. I don’t produce any prints of the slide.

It takes between two to three months for a typical 5.5 X 8” painting, working nine to five, five days a week.

Introspective

My process is based around the notion that if I restrict my materials and set parameters on my methods I’ll hinder the subjective decisions I make while painting.

’Running Man’, painted during a period of intense upheaval in my life, is an illustration of how my subconscious mind tinkers with this notion and makes me choose, without conscious understanding, to photograph and then paint an image that is full of subliminal representations of the experiences I’m living through: the running man in the upper window; the chain link fence surrounding the property.

It’s worth noting that the ‘white’ of the fence isn’t actually painted but is defined by the painted diamond shapes (more than six hundred of them) that define the background. The fence was the most challenging thing I’ve ever painted and more than once I feared I had ruined the painting.

Artifacts

Live Stock Salesmen 2001, 12 X 18" acrylic on paper.

The other morning I woke up with the unmistakable ache of a night spent clenching my teeth in my sleep.

The previous evening I had attended an opening at an art museum in Montreal. A rare event for me but an acquaintance was having his first museum show.

It triggered enough anxiety for a night of gnashing.

Despite the scope and significance of his show, my friend wasn’t the star attraction of the evening. Another young Canadian with an even larger international stamp of approval was the main draw.

The latter was a contrived and clumsily executed mish mash of apparent interest to the indie-hipster community.

As my girlfriend Hayley and I bumped through the crowds and tried to make sense of the exhibits it began to dawn that there was little sense to be made.

I tried to imagine my own work in the grand museum spaces and couldn’t.

Photorealists have become the lamplighters of contemporary art. What began as a serious offshoot of pop art’s light hearted mockery, photorealism has become bogged down by the superficiality that comes from an obsessive interest in technique.

Most photorealists live in a world blindered to the realities of the mainstream art world, weighed down by the notion of craftsmanship, of narrative. The notion of right and wrong. The hierarchy of skill lurking in the psyche.

My night at the museum pointed out for me the depth of the gulf between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Digital photographs printed on canvas and scumbled with glazes or otherwise manipulated by hand in some minor way are de rigeur these days. There is little disclosure made by artists and galleries of the largely mechanical nature of these works.

The question in my mind is, if the art world doesn’t care how an image is made, what does photorealism offer the world of contemporary art?

If it offers only technical proficiency then we’re all in trouble. There has to be more to a painting than a well rendered surface.

Art should speak to people beyond the walls of the compound. What are you saying and why should anyone care?

Show Comments

The Only Seafoods, 1995 11.25 X 17" acrylic on paper.

When I began showing at O.K. Harris in 2004, one of the things that surprised me was the lack of provision for a comment book. With five simultaneous openings they feel, quite rightly, that a space to hold comment books would only get in the way.

It’s something I thought I’d miss but selling paintings turns out to be a good way to make you forget.

When things weren’t selling well at my shows in Canada, the comment book was something to look forward to. The kind comments of friends, relatives and strangers were a balm for the soul.

I’ll admit the comments from people I didn’t know were the most fascinating, here are some of my favourites.

From children:

--These Paintings look real!! (M. Irwin age 10)
--How did you do it? (A. Wilton)
--I. S. P. 2nd 2 big O. (unsigned!)

From the unconvinced:

--Different! (Gisele B.)
--Interesting work (C. McDermott)
--OK OK, But what is the relationship between these images + watercolours of them? (G.A.)
--Photorealism, again. (D. Brierly)

From the supportive:

--Your work is spiritual (L. Ulysses Castellana) written in an elaborate script!
--Save the realism! Great work! (B. Sung)
--WICKED STUFF!! AMAZING Good work! (unsigned)

Finally, from the helpful:

--Keep it Urban- Neon Landscape rools
P.S. Lose the frames (Renel)
--nice imagery- loosen up- (unsigned)

Provenance

It’s not in the least unusual for a child to draw a house. Kids who don’t grow up in houses also draw them. In the young mind its familiar shape evokes thoughts of comfort and safety, the cocoon of the nuclear family.



'House' circa 1963

I found this drawing of mine recently in some papers I’d stuffed away in the chaos of the days following my Father’s death in 2005. He had kept it with other remnants of my childhood drawings as all parents do.

I was struck by the irony in the image: not many children find themselves nearly fifty years later still puzzling out the meaning in these simple shapes.

In the eighties I started painting houses based on the disappearing smaller houses of the North Toronto neighbourhood in which I grew up and in those days still lived. In retrospect, I was yearning for the past and subconsciously fighting off the inevitability of change.

Wishing things were the way they used to be is a good way to distract oneself from wondering if those times were as good as one remembers. What I thought of as ‘the story of my past’ but which was a construct of necessity, the kind of story we tell ourselves to make things feel better, began to fall apart in earnest just as my art career found its legs.

Not surprisingly, and again with considerable retrospective irony, I began to revisit the house as subject in 2006 with ‘Running Man’. This was at the height of my own domestic turmoil which dissolved a marriage and with the death of my Father, ended a sixteen year experiment in intergenerational living.

After dealing with the disposal of the detritus of several lives and the sale of a large home I found myself finishing the painting in my new abode, a 270 square foot studio apartment which was enough to hold what what was left of my life.

The little childhood drawing has made me think about what’s behind the new interest in an old subject.

I feel there is a certain detachment in the newer images. That I’m seeing these structures as the facades they are, no longer representing for me any kind of security or repository of good memories.

I’m still poking at the ashes of the past in my art. To the extent that anyone can relate to these images, I’m content to have this be my contribution to the world.

I’m also beginning to accept and perhaps even enjoy that the paths we’re on never seem to take us to the expected places.



'House with Motorcycle' 2008, 8 X 5.5" Acrylic on paper.

New Painting: 'Pizza'

Pizza 2009, 5.5 X 8" Acrylic on illustration board

The one problem, or should I say, ‘feature’ of my technique is that I can’t make anything lighter once it’s painted. I don’t use any white paint and have no way of correcting an error of that sort.

This means patiently building up layers of thin washes, carefully avoiding putting paint on anything that will appear white in the finished image.

‘Pizza’ clocks in at an absurd 419.5 hours. Lots of darkness in the image, lots of detail. Things that make my paintings take a long time. Makes me want to do a white building in the snow next but I don’t have any winter images from which to work.

With winter finally entrenched in Montreal, I’ll have to head out with the camera and see what happens. In fact, I have a particular white building in mind!

‘Pizza’ is my first Montreal image. I seem to have successfully managed the mental transition to the new place I call home.

I took the photo over a year ago, returning to a place I’d been (without my camera) several months before. I was thankful the sign was still there but then, this is a part of town that isn’t exactly booming.

There too was the same guy (or someone just like him) in front of a tattoo parlour, having a smoke, fixing me with a bemused smirk. I was too annoyed by his ‘I own the sidewalk’ stance to let him put me off.

Admittedly, this is the kind of thing that usually does put me off but I said to myself ‘Artist at work, pal!’ while I took a couple of photos.

As I leave the scene, I usually feign interest in some random object across the street or look at my camera as though checking its settings. Avoiding eye contact at all cost!

I have fantasies of an empty city in which to photograph. No cars parked in front of houses. No guy on a cell phone standing in front of the only store on the block you want to shoot.

On foot, I’ve circled blocks waiting for people to clear out or for cars to leave the twenty minute zone they’ve been in for half an hour.

One would think that after sixteen years of this, I would have sorted out a painless routine for picture taking but it remains something I do out of grudging necessity rather than pleasure.

The world is full of confused, irate store owners and stupefied, slack-jawed onlookers and they are legion when I leave the house with my camera.

100 Paintings

Occasionally the fog of the daily routine lifts and I take account of what I’ve been doing in the larger context of time.

Going through the lists I keep for completed paintings I noticed recently that I’d completed over a hundred paintings in the photorealist style. It seems almost unbelievable to me, given how slow my process is.


(music: Sitting Still Moving Still Staring Outlooking- His Name is Alive)

I can mark the beginning of my photorealist period accurately as I started doing them over the course of one weekend in 1993 after reaching the end of my patience with my former painting methods. It was a difficult decision making orphans of the paintings I’d spent the previous decade creating.

Projecting a photo, drawing it and painting it was the most fun I’d had in a long while and I loved the results. The process seemed miraculously transformative. I felt an objective detachment from the work for which I’d been unconsciously yearning.

The paintings in the video are presented in chronological order and without edits. Every painting I produced from 1993 to 2007 is represented. I find it interesting, in the video, that whenever I seem to be on an identifiable path I veer off into the woods unexpectedly for a painting or two.

I’d like to some day chronicle, year by year, the trials of my life as they related to the paintings I made, tying the two together in a psychologically informative way.

I still own almost a third of the paintings I produced in that period. Early sign paintings, the odd dud and the anomalies like ‘Manitoba Landscape’ and ‘Bride and Groom’. I jokingly refer to these as my ‘retirement fund’ but I’m not entirely convinced the assets will be worth anything when the day comes.

It’s taken a long time to figure out what and why I’m painting but I think I’m finally on to something.

Given that my paintings take longer to paint now than they did sixteen years ago I figure number two hundred should come around in about twenty years.

Stay tuned.

In Progress: 'Pizza'

I don't often take 'in progress' photos because I can't seem to add a regular photo taking session to my routine.

The internet is full of time lapse movies of paintings being painted. I've always thought I'd like to do it but for me the time commitment is daunting. The few times I've tried, I've inevitably forgotten to do it one day and spoiled the project.

This series of photos at least gives an idea of my process.

The section of 'Pizza' being painted is two inches by three inches.


(After 7.5 hours)


(After 21.5 hours)


(After 35 hours)

Studio Visit

I recently had an experience which illustrated for me the phenomenal changes that have taken place in my life over the last six years.

My friend Randall Anderson had arranged for his John Abbot CEGEP art class to visit several studios in Montreal where his friends maintain their diverse artistic practices. It would give the students a tangible feeling for what life looks like for practicing artists.

Hayley and I and our open plan condo would be the second last stop on the tour.

Randall suggested that I join the students as my day would already be interrupted. Sounded like a good idea!

In an exhausting but immensely enjoyable eight hour period, traveling from St. Henri in Montreal’s southwest to Petite Italie in the north, we visited the studios of Doug Scholes, David Spriggs, Etienne Zack and of course, ours and Randall’s.

I’ve only just begun to see that it helps my own practice to discover that people working outside my genre are often, surprisingly, working with similar concerns. Even those that aren’t help to further define my practice to myself.

I’ve spent most of my life as an artist working in complete isolation from other artists. I’ve always been wary of being unduly influenced by the thoughts of others, likely because of an overwhelming insecurity I’ve had in my own ideas.

More recently, I’ve been coming to terms with the fact that I’ve isolated myself for other reasons as well.

I’m a recovering recluse. Like most people recovering from debilitating conditions, I’m on constant alert for signs of slipping back into old habits. My default position has always been to disappear, to observe the world through a window.

I have a notion that my Mother, affected by her experiences in wartime Glasgow, passed on to me a feeling of being under siege. During the war she was a young woman coping with an untenable existence at home while also under the strain of constant air raid sirens and bombings.

When I was a child she and I spent what feels like an inordinate amount of time peeking from windows, hiding behind doors, waiting for the landlord, the Fuller Brush man, the Avon lady, or some other unknown solicitor to get the message and move on down the street.

A knock on the front door was a signal to shut the hell up and sidle slowly to a curtained window to see whether or not the door really needed to be answered. It was occasionally a misguided neighbourhood friend trying to get me to leave the house. I’d answer the door but I didn’t always leave the house to play.

Summertime allergies added to my desire to hole up, peering from the front window like an invalid tracking the movements of the neighbourhood.

I still get a jolt when the phone rings or when there’s a knock on the door. The miracle of call display helps quell some of the panic and there’s always the peep hole in the event someone makes it past the security of our condo’s main door. Old habits die hard.

I know now that I have the ability to be part of things that happen beyond my walls. To rise to the challenge of everyday social situations or, in the case of the class visit, to withstand the intrusion of twenty or so people into my private realm.

I also know (fair warning to my forty or so facebook friends) the old habit will unexpectedly kick in again someday and I’ll inevitably go in to my facebook account, click on ‘settings’ and hit ‘deactivate’.

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.