Abstract to Figurative

New Approaches

After the Schiele/Klimt diptych I wanted to try some abstract paintings as well as some more realistic paintings. I was still trying to find a way to paint that satisfied me because I was so much more comfortable doing drawings. I wasn't happy with either experiment but doing them helped me to eventually find out what I was trying to make.

Realism

I did a triptych of my parents and I to practice surrendering to ...rendering and stop trying to draw with paint.

Modernist Abstraction and Graffiti

I also tried to combine local grafitti styles with forms and compositions I liked in Modernist Abstraction. Here are some existing examples.

The On-Hiatus-From-School-Post-Cubist-Nudes

Soon after I did these paintings I dropped out of OCAD, moved to Scarborough with my girlfriend (of the time) and her family. We lived in a townhouse near McGowan and Finch and my girlfriend's mom said I could set up a studio in the garage. It was freezing in the winter-I wore everything I could think of under this smock jumpsuit I got in Kensington; I looked like the marshmallow man. I also used a very modest space-heater. It was hard to get anything done because I was working 9-5 at a warehouse an hour and 45 minutes from the house. Meanwhile the distractions of love and television were on the other side of the wall. However, it was at this time that I really started to paint some paintings that had nothing to do with school or trying to work on a specific weakness. What was really exciting was that they were a successful (I think) combination of all the different approaches I'd used in the past.

They were based on life-drawings I had done at the Toronto School of Art. With the exception of the The Wanderer (the last one), which took me a few hours, they all took way longer than I had ever spent on a piece before. Each took me several months to complete with many crossroads and painful snares along the way.

Genesis of a Blog

The Purpose

The purpose of this blog is to keep people informed about upcoming exhibitions and projects I’m involved in. I also wanted something more professional-looking than a Myspace or Facebook profile displaying my portfolio. Eventually I’ll have a website that will handle that part and this blog will be reserved for news, updates and musings on my creative process.

The Mixed Media Life-Drawings

I used to do Friday-night life-drawing sessions almost every week with my dad at the Toronto School of Art from 2004 to 2006. The poses varied in length from 1-minute to 25-minutes long. I would often spraypaint on pastel paper before-hand and then draw the figures over -top of that with a pencil or ballpoint pen. When I got home I would add some more colours with pencil crayon and sometimes acrylic paint and frame the most successful ones. I was influenced by the illustrations of Canadian artists Elicser and Ben Tour at this time because their work was in my friend's older brother's hip hop culture magazine. I was impressed by the effects they were able to achieve with cheap stationary-store ballpoint pens. A lot of my works from this time were included in the first solo show I organized at a place called Fez Batik, which used to be at Peter and Richmond. Here are some of them.

First Forays into Painting

I was also starting to paint with acrylic on canvas around this time but mostly just for school assignments.This diptych of Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt was also shown at the Fez Batik show. The rule I made for myself was that I was not going to use brushes. I mostly used a rolled-up T-shirt caked in paint. I think I also used some guitar strings.

My thinking was that I was doing two Abstract Expressionist paintings that happened to be representational, an idea that I've continued to consider when I paint. I'm much happier with the Klimt one on the right because it could almost work as a strictly abstract painting and it occurred more naturally than the Schiele portrait (which I did first.)