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
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.
