New Painting: 'House on Marconi'

House on Marconi 2010, 5.5 X 8" acrylic on illustration board.

It’s an odd sensation painting something that one walks by everyday. The subject of ‘House on Marconi’ sits only a few yards from our front door.

Over the last few months, during the daily dog walk, I’ve occasionally been tempted to check out details that were unclear in the source photograph but I mostly avoided looking too hard. There’s an awkward creepiness in paying so much furtive attention to someone else’s house. It’s not unlike developing an obsessive crush on the person who makes your soy latte every morning. Not that I would know anything about that.

Being so deeply immersed in a subject, as one is when spending three months painting it, is an unusual experience. All the more unusual given the prosaic nature of the subject. No one in the ‘real’ world ever spends that much time considering such a quotidian scene.

I have a complicated, subconscious response to my subjects that feels almost physical. It may be the sense of desolation or the inherent, sad beauty of the unremarkable facades but I get a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach when confronted by the scenes that become paintings. They act as clues to some long buried personal mystery, each one giving a sense of bringing me closer to resolution but never delivering a result.

As I sort through my slides looking for the subject of my next painting, I have to constantly remind myself that it’s the pit-of-my-stomach, anxiety-disorder, existential aloneness that I’m painting, not old houses, storefronts, or my neighbourhood. Certain examples of these things can trigger in me the feeling I’m wanting to explore but aren’t, in and of themselves, a reason to paint.

Performance Ritual

Recently, I filmed an entire day of my painting process, my ‘Performance Ritual’. It was an exhausting day. I had a long list of shots I needed to illustrate the typical day in my studio beginning with the first few moments after waking at seven to the final marking of my time sheet and extinguishing of my lamp at five.

Much of what I wanted to record was the cycle of activity outside the walls of my condo-studio. In my isolated art-bubble, the daily routines of the mechanics, the body shop, the commuter train, the school bus depot, embrace me as part of the larger world of work. In our previous neighbourhood, a family filled street of brick duplexes and triplexes whose facades ran unbroken from one end of the block to the other, the daily exodus for work or school left the neighbourhood eerily quiet, the conventional nature of life there only accentuating the isolation that an artist can sometimes feel.

I’ve connected ‘work’ with my art since I quit my job to explore the possibility of painting full time in 1983. A combination of guilt and an overblown presbyterian work ethic ensures that my practice is a sober one. I’ve never owned an easel or a palette or worked with more than one brush although I will admit to wearing a beret in snowstorms in the eighties.

My improbable choice of working surface, a metal, sixties office desk and my lifelong fascination for offices and office supplies and equipment no doubt stems from my Father’s long held job at an insurance company whose offices were a repository of oddballs and cranks that I mostly feared and my Mother’s job in the sixties, cleaning offices from which she’d return, late at night, with the discards of Union Carbide: outdated stationery, Eveready Battery signs, battery testers and odd product labels on sheets.

As a child I endured one or two Christmas parties at my Father’s workplace and one staff picnic of which my only memory is getting lost and tearfully searching for my Father among the drunken adults. While the office discards of reams of paper and other supplies kept me busy as a kid, my Father mostly kept this part of his life separate from his family and bred in me a resentment for this other ‘family’.

I’m always fascinated by how well buried are the roots of our present day actions. My intuitive desire to film a day of work juxtaposed with the routines of the workers outside my studio brought home to me, yet again, the connections between our childhood experiences and the sometimes puzzling choices we make as adults.

The Artist's Statement

Rosedale Manor 2007, 5.5 X 8" acrylic on paper.

The artist statement is an odd document. The bastard child of art and literature, often neither artistic nor literate. It is to art what ‘compulsory figures’ were to nineteen sixties figure skating competitions: an adjudicated series of prescribed moves which relate only marginally to artistic expression.

I’ve always resented and resisted the kind of statement that results in successful grant applications. Not surprisingly, I haven’t had many successful grant applications. When I think of a juror on a grant committee, I transpose, in my mind, an elderly East German figure skating judge: a stooped man in a drab overcoat, peering at the cuts on the ice and marking his card in the manner of the juror checking off the currently acceptable phrases and concepts.

Though I’m convinced no one has ever read any of my statements, I’ve always found them to be a good way to crystalise an explanation of what my subconscious is trying to accomplish in my work. A way of conveying to the average person the intent behind a seemingly nondescript collection of images.

My most recent statement for Jim Kempner Fine Art is marginally more ‘art world’ than usual for me but given my new audience and a burgeoning awareness of some long hidden concepts in my process, it seemed appropriate.

Please forgive me for referring to ontology.

*****

Artist’s Statement:

In 1993 I began using photo based imagery in order to eliminate the identifiable marks I make as an artist. In practice, using a single photographic slide as reference and adhering strictly to the information presented in the image is as close as a realist painter can get to objectivity. By restricting my palette (two reds, two blues, yellow and black) the size of the paintings (5.5 X 8”) and by using a single brush (an inexpensive #6 gold sable) I’ve further eliminated many subjective decisions from my process.

I don’t seek out my subjects. They emerge from the periphery of awareness and are almost entirely buildings which have achieved a level of invisibility in their surroundings. The kind of invisibility that heralds transformation: renovation; destruction. I’m interested in the ontological question of being: If it’s ‘invisible’ to everyone, does it exist?

Monday to Friday I work at an old office desk from 9 am to 5 pm. I begin the day by removing the paints from a drawer on my left and placing them on the desk. I remove the painting from a box in front of the desk. At noon I break for lunch and record my morning’s hours on a time sheet that I keep in a drawer on the right. At 12:30 pm I resume working until 5 pm when I record the afternoon’s hours on the sheet. This ritual contravenes the notion of the artist as free spirit, presenting instead the artist as worker, toiling to create an article of cultural consumption. The product is a much fetishised image on board: the average 5.5 X 8” painting requiring 280 hours to complete from a slide exposed at 1/60th of a second, a time factor of 60,480,000 to 1.

I’ve come to accept the folly of hoping to eliminate the self through representative imagery but I’ve managed what is, for me, an acceptable level of detachment from my subject and the physical object of the completed painting through the restrictions I’ve imposed on my process.


Neil MacCormick

September, 2010.

The Cliff

Being an artist means sometimes doing what seems most frightening. Normally, the days go by in a pleasant kind of tedium, a feeling that work is getting done. After so many years of refining a process, there’s little to sort out beyond the logistics of how one tackles the next area to be painted. The mind often fixates on other less immediate things like ‘Why is my ankle sore?’ and ‘What the hell is up with my art career?’ The latter question usually precedes a sickly feeling in the stomach and an effort to get back to wondering about the ankle.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my career. Beyond changing the way the paintings are presented in their frames or the desire to call myself something other than ‘photorealist’, I’ve felt a growing urge to find a new audience for my work. It’s either a hazard of my psyche or my trade but the days spent painting while simultaneously deconstructing every decision I’ve ever made sometimes results in finding a question that needs to be answered: “Can I place my work in the larger context of contemporary art and escape the confining clutches of ‘photorealism’?”

Managing one’s art career isn’t something people talk about. I certainly don’t think it’s something anyone teaches, only the individual artist can visualise the path forward. For me, the persistent itch of dissatisfaction for my lot is what drives most of my career decisions. The ‘itch’ is something I feel is crucial to the development of one’s art, never mind one’s career. Complacency and satisfaction toll the death knell for originality.

With this in mind, I made a bold move and in my ever-expanding search for a new context, I ended my six year relationship with O.K. Harris in SoHo and found a new starting point as the only photo-based painter at Jim Kempner Fine Art in Chelsea. The change came quickly when I finally puzzled out what change was needed. Like a tectonic plate, I can sometimes shock myself and those around me by making an unexpected move.

If we’re lucky and if we’re open to it, life can take us to unexpected places. Two years ago, I couldn’t have imagined leaving the security of O.K. Harris. As I walked out of Kempner, having dropped off three paintings to meet their fate in Chelsea, I felt like I had just jumped off a cliff. I’d set in motion something whose outcome was unclear to me. I walked to the end of 23rd street and composed myself on a bench in the park at Chelsea Piers, assuring myself that I’d done the right thing.

Whether or not my work finds its audience at Jim Kempner, I feel now that the important thing, as an artist, was jumping off the cliff.

New Painting: 'Oriental(e)'

Oriental(e) 2010, 5.5 X 8" acrylic on illustration board.

Oriental(e) is a tofu manufacturer located a short block from our condo/studio. It has that beyond-its-best-before-date look. In our neighbourhood, that means a new condo will rise in place of a freshly razed building and the empty lot next door. The building is, in fact, for sale for less money than we paid for our condo. If not for the intimidating and expensive prospect of converting it to a studio, we’d be buying. Who doesn’t want a garage door entry to their studio? I’m assuming the mice would leave with the dearth of tofu manufacturing but maybe that’s a mistaken assumption on my part. The lot next door might be unavailable to developers as it’s ‘occupied’ by a mysterious person or persons in a tent. In over a year we have yet to figure out what goes on beyond the hoarding that hems in the property. We do indeed live in a curious neighbourhood.

The slide from which I painted ‘Oriental(e)’ was taken after the building’s ‘For Sale’ sign fortuitously blew off in a storm. I hadn’t managed a good photo of the building before the sign went up and I didn’t want a shot of the building with the sign. One of my rules is to use only one slide per painting. The only manipulation I allow to the photo is a subtle cropping to centre the image. I use a slide viewer through which I peer at the small section of the image on which I’m working. The completed image often comes as something of a surprise. Having concentrated for several months on such small parts of it, the whole of the image seems quite fresh to my eyes. I often have to rack my brain to remember which painting I’ve just completed.

‘Oriental(e)’ is a perfect illustration of the transitional building I find so appealing. A nondescript structure just at the edge of its usefulness in a changing neighbourhood. One day no one will remember it was there.

I’ve come to accept that transition is a good thing in ones life. I’m entering year eight in a period of transitions both major and minor in what, I’ve convinced myself, has otherwise been a relatively stable existence. As difficult as it can sometimes be, I think I’ve come to prefer transition’s anxiety, uncertainty and inherent feeling of ‘reality’ to the numbing illusions borne of a desire for stability.

Recontextualisation

‘Recontextualisation’ is a word that’s been on my mind for a while. A seemingly simple concept: take something from its normal place in the world and stick it somewhere else. See what happens.

I’ve had a growing feeling that my work needs to be seen in a different way. I don’t feel that I’m doing what other photorealists are doing. I’ve suspected for a long time that my process was more a part of understanding the work than I’ve been giving it credit. I can look back on more than seventeen years of development and finally see some patterns emerging.

I’ve always felt a little uneasy about the ‘photorealism’ moniker. Mention to anyone in the art world, someone who doesn’t know what you do, that you’re a photorealist and watch the look of contempt or pity or disinterest wash over their face. ‘It looks like a photo!’ can be praise or condemnation in equal measure. Non art-world people always love that I paint recognisable images and are happy to share their own version of contempt for the non-objective art forms with me.

I’ve always wanted to paint this way, long before I realised it wouldn’t be a particularly art-world thing to do. I can’t explain my desire, it just always seemed ‘right’ but how does one get people to look past the superficial looks-like-a-photo nature of the work?

It takes me an unfathomably long time to paint a painting. The time commitment has felt more like a burden than a necessary part of the story. Why does it take me twice as long as the next person to paint a similar sized painting? I sometimes feel like an idiot savant, having stumbled upon a process without understanding how it happened.

I’ve finally reached a point where each new painting isn’t taking longer than the one previous. For years the paintings shrank from 12 X 18 inches to 8 X 12 and finally to 5.5 X 8 as I tried to find a way to produce a decent number of paintings in a year. At my last show, Ivan Karp suggested that if I produced more work I could have more shows and wouldn’t that be a good thing? I jokingly said I could produce more if they were smaller. He slowly shook his head and in a quiet voice said ‘No.... don’t make them smaller’.

As I‘ve mentioned in other posts, I record the number of hours I paint every day. I started this as a way of knowing how long it would take to produce work for a show I once had scheduled in Toronto. If I knew how many hours a painting took to paint, I could plot out my work for the upcoming months. Ten years later I still record this information every day. Something in this act relates directly to my practice or I would have stopped. It’s not just a quirk of style that makes my method so laborious.

The other day I made a surprising calculation. If one perceives the average time for the shutter to open and close on my camera as one unit of time then over 62,000,000 of those units are needed to complete the average 5.5 X 8 inch painting of the captured image.

Clearly something strange is going on here.

New Painting: A.B. Demolition

A.B. Demolition 2010, 5.5 X 8" acrylic on illustration board.

My third Montreal painting, A.B. Demolition is part of a trio of derelict buildings on Rue Mont-Royal in our old neighbourhood of the east Plateau. A building so forlorn that even its demolition has faltered.

I didn’t think of the inherent irony in the upside-down ‘Demolition’ sign until I’d finished the painting. In the nineteen-eighties my ex-wife and I used to joke that everything I painted ended up getting knocked down or unsympathetically renovated within weeks of the completion of a painting or drawing.

It seemed uncanny, whether a service station, house or bridge, I had a knack for unconsciously spotting something on the verge of a major transition: a white porceline-enamel skinned Texaco station just before a dumpster heralds its final days; a bungalow which soon finds itself overwhelmed by a cancerous looking addition.

It’s something for which I still have a feeling. I inevitably photograph and paint things which have achieved a certain amount of invisibility in their neighbourhoods. When something becomes so out of step with its surroundings, it will either find itself being revered or destroyed. Sometimes both in quick succession. Incidentally, we do this as well to people who dare to be out of step with the parameters we’ve set for ‘normal’.

No one likes to see the ravages of time these places represent. Nor can we face it in ourselves. We like to move on, renovate and rebuild, not acknowledging our own inevitable decline. Subconsciously thinking that if we do not stay on top of the decay, we’ll soon be overtaken.

The subjects for my paintings are the least likely to be revered. Most will be destroyed in one way or another. They are the architectural wallflowers of the city, representing the unforgiving nature of time. Existing in silence and in their passing unmourned.

Myth Making

Basic Inquiry Studio 2003, 5.5 X 8" acrylic on paper

It sounds unfathomably naive to me now but in my innocence, or ignorance, I’ve always felt that one day someone, somehow, would become aware of my work and be moved to add me to a volume or article on photorealism, or perhaps review or curate a show of my work.

My art education, such as it is, comes from a meagre selection of books and magazine articles. It never occurred to me that art books could be vehicles for self promotion, a dealer promoting their ‘stable’ or possibly their own holdings of art. I’ve imagined these volumes to be objectively compiled by knowledgeable altruists but they’re actually a product of the highly subjective opinions of a handful of people.

This reality inspired me almost a year ago to start this blog as a way of telling my story. I’ve come to think of it as personal myth making.

It’s taken me a long time to feel that I have a story worth telling or even that I have a story. As the youngest child in my family I believed that life was what happened to other people. An older brother or sister. My mother or father. Surely what ‘happened’ to me was of no consequence. I was the furniture in the room observing other people living lives.

I’ve lived most of my life in isolation. It wasn’t until my life fell apart in 2004 that I realised how isolated I’d been. I found myself, without friends, in a city where I’d lived for almost twenty years. When I forced myself, out of desperation, to leave my house and entertain the idea of connecting with strangers, I found that I had things to share with them. Oddly compelling things. It was easy for me to turn the painful events of my mid-life disasters into entertaining pub conversations. People enjoy knowing some are worse off than they.

I’ve become hyperaware of the stories people tell about themselves. The way we frame our experiences to suit a desired personal narrative. Anyone who is interviewed regularly has concocted a legend which is strengthened in the retelling.

It’s a cruel truth that not everyone wants us to be happy or successful. It’s easy to find oneself being labeled in a way we wouldn’t choose for ourselves by those who, for whatever reason, would like to keep us from fulfilling our goals.

It turns out I really have lived a life. Taking control of one’s own story and giving it an understandable narrative arc is one way of ensuring that no one else decides the narrative for us.

The Myth of Sisyphus

A.B. Demolition (in progress, detail 1.25 X 8" 31.5 hours)


Some mornings I can’t face the prospect of yet another day of painting. When I’ve completed a painting and I’m about to start another I often have in mind the myth of Sisyphus. In punishment for innumerable offenses, the gods condemned Sisyphus for eternity to push a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down as he approached the summit.

I’m not sure for what I’m being punished but some mornings the dream of being a full time artist feels like a bad idea.

Success has a slippery definition. By many accounts I’m a successful artist. I show at a well known New York gallery. I sell most if not all of the paintings I produce. My prices have gone up more than five hundred percent in six years. On the other hand, I earn less than the hourly minimum wage in Quebec and my work is virtually unknown in my own country or much beyond the narrow sub genre of photorealism.

It’s easy to be envious of the prices other artists receive for their work but it’s rarely mentioned that sluggish sales often accompany lofty prices. I remind myself that the main reason for embarking on a painting career so many years ago wasn’t the allure of untold riches but the promise of self realisation and self direction. There are any number of ways to turn a facility for art into a good income but I chose to make paintings.

Albert Camus said in his 1942 essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’: ‘The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart’. As I begin my second half-century, on those mornings when I struggle to find a reason to continue to care about painting, I remind myself that Camus died in a car accident at forty-seven and that he doesn’t mention with what the heart is filling.

As evidenced by the above photo, I managed to begin another painting. I made my way back down the hill, took a breath, placed my hands on the rock and braced myself to push.

'Ghost'

Girl and Fish, 2001 5.5 X 8" acrylic on paper

I stopped painting neon signs in or around 2001. My interest in the subject was killed by the ‘Hooray for neon!’ feelings engendered in viewers. In its place, I was tempted for a time by the graffiti I was encountering in Victoria and Vancouver. I took a lot of pictures and made a few paintings.

For years I had been aware of a graffiti artist in Victoria who tagged his work ‘Ghost’ or less frequently ‘Pawz’. His odd elf-like portraits appeared everywhere. Over the course of a year I painted three paintings in which his work featured prominently.

In the comment book for my show ‘Relic’ at Bau-Xi gallery in Toronto in early 2001, someone wrote in a strange script taking up an entire page: “Victoria... a sleepy little town to perfect a skill. And spooky stories of Beacon Hill Park. Nice Ghost shots, Hans would appreciate it.”

I assumed Hans was ‘Ghost’. I did one more painting of Victoria graffiti before I moved on to other subjects and thought nothing more of ‘Ghost’. I’d stopped taking photos of graffiti altogether.

(Bomb, 2002 18 X 12" acrylic on paper)

In 2002 a small article in a local Victoria paper caught my attention. It described a fundraiser being held in memoriam for Hans Fear. A year earlier, not long after my Bau-Xi show, ‘Ghost’ had hanged himself.

The article explained that Hans had been schizophrenic and had made a conscious decision to stay off his medication because it affected his art.

The story marked a bit of a change in how I saw the graffiti paintings I’d been doing. I was unintentionally celebrating the work of another artist in these paintings. Not that he didn’t deserve the recognition but I began to get a similar feeling of the artist hiding behind a subject as I’d had with the neon signs.

I was haunted by the belated news of Ghost’s death for months and found myself compelled to write a poem:

Ghost

You signed
spray-can portraits
on plywood windows –
an impish girl turned
upside-down
by workmen.

Holding the serrated blade of art
over medication’s flaccid flesh –
a black and hollow face
on a hoarding.

You hanged yourself
on a hilltop
in view of
floating mountains
the canvas of the city
receding below -
your spray lines
fading slowly
or abruptly covered.

Graffiti Creatures, 2000 12 X 18" acrylic on paper