(A) Return on Art Practice
From field to field and to fields in between.
As with most children, when I was very young I began experimenting with and expressing myself through the arts. I did what most other kids did; I played with crayons, pencils, and markers. I drew in coloring books. I made portraits of my family members and favorite pets. I drew my house.
Here is the thing: Some 30-odd years later, I’m still doing the same thing. I play with crayons, pencils, markets, paint brushes, I paint portraits of people, and I draw houses. I never stopped. I’ve been going strong for 30+ years.
The image you see above is my first “official” work of visual art. I made many others more or less in the same period, but this was the first one not only to get framed, but that was genuinely, stylistically “me”. It was an authentic expression, since 30 years later I’m still doing the same thing. I was 8.
Periods in the (ongoing) Art Practice
To simplify things, since I want to write about specifics of the various experiments I’ve made in the visual arts over the last three decades, I will “periodize” my own art practice. It will be simple. I will break it into a few “tentative chunks”, let’s say:
First period: 1977–1989
Second period: 1990–2001
Third period: 2001–2012
Fourth period: 2013–2016
Today I want to talk about the end of the Second period and the beginning of the Third period, as defined above, i.e. in this case it would be a “subset”-type “subperiod” crossing over two periods, between the years 1998–2004.
Subperiod 1998–2004
Within Subperiod 1998–2004, there is another Subperiod 2001–2004. I will start there. (And document the subperiodization methodology later on).
In the Summer of 2001, I moved to Montreal with a close friend. As I was unpacking boxes, I was eager to get my studio up and running so that I could get back to work. Moving is hard when you’re a productive artist because you generally will always lose some continuity. But you learn tricks along the way, and later on, perhaps in another piece, I will get into the nitty-gritty of how to successfully move an “Art Operation” without (much) loss of continuity.
As I unpacked all of those boxes, I took the empty boxes apart with a boxcutter and as I was doing that, I began using the scraps of cardboard as canvases. I improvized a “table” with a stack of large boxes and a suitcase, draped a dropcloth over it, and started working. I didn’t stop until the Autumn of 2004, when I moved again to another location. (Long story short, “moving to another location” seems to have been part of my modus operandi over the years, i.e. between 1994 roughly to 2016, I moved a total of 15–16 times.)
The History-Project circa 2001–2004
I won’t get into many details about the History-Project itself qua project, since I have already done much of that in the recent past, some of which is in this very Collection, The Painter’s Almanach. No, what I want to do is explain some of the experiments I did, document the process, the various techniques and methods used, how I was inspired to do such and such an experiment, and so on and so forth. At the time, I documented as much as I could, but never as much as I would now hope I had. The good thing is that I have a phenomenal photographic memory and can easily reconstruct almost every painting and/or related experiments in the visual arts, or arts in general.
So here we are, Summer of 2001, painting on cardboard. I want to fast-forward a little to 2002, 2003, and 2004. As with any of my Projects, the first part, where it is first recognized, inaugurated, explored, etc., is always a special moment when I look back, years later. The thing is, for me now the really interesting experiments come a little bit later on in the life of a project.
For instance, in the so-called History-Project, at some point I started working in a workshop where I was doing “enamel on copper”, you know, with the ovens and everything. I worked in that workshop for a while, and began waking up at the crack of dawn every day, before going to work, and I would do a self-portrait every morning in pencil, and/or charcoal, Sanguine, etc.
I kept doing my morning self-portraits every day the whole time I worked at the enamel-on-copper workshop and kept doing self-portraits long after that. Actually, I’ve been making self-portraits my whole life. I may have accidentally invented the selfie. Let me make a small digression down Memory Road.
The Polaroid Kid: The Making of The Diary of a Self-Portrait
When I was still very young, I would go on expeditions with my father and brother. We went all over Quebec. Back then, obviously, we didn’t have digital cameras or mobile phones. I did have a small camera, though, that I always brought with me everywhere I went.
I forget the make of the camera, but the really fun thing about it was that it took square photos, maybe roughly 3 inches by 3 inches square. I experimented a great deal with this camera, took dozens of rolls of film. I also took self-portraits, or what we would today call “Selfies”.
You have to put things in context. I was born in a time when instant photography was state-of-the-art, at least within the technological context of that era. Polaroids and so forth had existed long before I was born, but it wasn’t always affordable to everyone, as inexpensive as it might have been.
The point is, I grew up being exposed to hundreds if not thousands of small square photographs, whether they were from Polaroid-type instant cameras or from my own little camera in the 1980s. And I always took selfies, and I always drew or painted self-portraits. End of digression.
Visual Experiments circa 2002–2004
As I have done in the text above, I will continue to focus solely on my visual art and experiments therein. I stress this point because I am at heart an interdisciplinary artist. That is, I express myself though Images, Sounds, and Texts. The Sounds &Texts parts will have to be dealt with on their own terms.
Above is an image, a juxtaposition of two works of visual art that I made, seen side by side. Of my many experiments, at the time this was one of my favorites. I felt so happy at the result — though one of the images seen here is out of focus, blame the photographer.
The “challenge” if you will, was to create too montages, or collages, or “assemblages” / “assemblies” that were two different, unique pieces, but that looked the same. I didn’t want them to be identical, just “close enough” to fool the “casual viewer”. And it worked. Most people do not attend to all of the details of a work of art. They just look at it and take a “mental snapshot” if you will. Then maybe they contemplate it a little, but most people wouldn’t notice if they left the room for a moment and I switched the painting they were looking at, say the one on the left in the image above, with the one on the right. They would walk back in and I could ask them questions, “So what did you like most about this piece before when you were studying it?”
As you will see in these and other related visual experiments, Art is always Artifice. That is, artifice is one of the main tools in the visual arts. Otherwise, paintings would just be flat two-dimensional surfaces no different than painted tabletops. What makes them MORE than mere tabletops is artifice, at least in part. Artifice, artistry, to me these are all synonyms for the same thing.
One may be “fooling” people, but one is fooling them into rich, and often profound, aesthetic experiences. So I have no qualms, and never had any qualms with this. I make people enjoy something that never existed until now. I am creating new experiences for them that they otherwise would never have had. But it is experimental, to me artistic production, creation, is always experimental. That is, there are never any GUARANTEES. That is why the author or artist relies so much on his/her AUDIENCE/PUBLIC. One needs FEEDBACK. Without it, one is simply some crazy person in a closet somewhere doing something nobody sees, nobody witnesses. One may as well be doing ANYTHING ELSE, i.e. go hang clothes to dry on a clothesline, or pack boxes of stuff at the Depot. Nobody sees you, nobody cares. And so one has to CATER to one’s audience, and this might deserve its own unique post.
Texture Synthesis: Working with Meshes
In the “Workshop” if you will, the “Atelier” or “art studio”, one is constantly, at least in my case, coming into contact with all sorts of materials. My art studio at the time, circa 2001–2004, was basically part of an elaborate “home network”, somewhere at the “end” of a bunch of “living processes”, at the end right before the recycling bin and the garbage dump.
That is to say, our home had “inputs” and “outputs”, if you want to look at it as a system like this. We brought in food and other items, products, and we dumped out garbage and recycling and so forth as “outputs”. The art studio was right in the middle of that process, meaning that I collected random collections of pre-recycling materials, before being thrown into the recycling bin or the garbage. In other words, I was “upcycling” a great deal of our “waste”. I had bags and bags filled with different colors and textures and shapes of “paper & cardboard”. I had collections of “interesting pieces of paper”. Because you never know what you’re going to want to stick in the next “mixed media” piece.
This is the case with the image shown above, where I used different materials I call “Meshes”, namely Gauze and a “Net bag” I would get from boxes of tangerines. Below is another similar experiment with “Meshes”.
The idea was to use the “Mesh” as a “visual element” in the work. The fact that I use TWO different kinds of “Meshes”, the gauze and the string bag, meant, at least in my understanding, that there would be varying patterns, call them “interference fringe patterns” caused by the “superposition” of the two unique “patterns” (patterns of the meshes). And I think it was a success. It’s maybe a little hard to see the full spectrum of the visual effect in a digital image. One had better see it in person. It is an amazing effect, I think, because as one moves from side to side, or towards the piece or away from it, the “texture of the meshes” VARIES/CHANGES and it alters the underlying image.
A Corruption of Beauty: Ledger Book + The Legal Tender Project
At one point, I was walking home from somewhere and I stumbled across a box full of these “ledger” type books. It turns out that the old church that was near my apartment was doing some house-cleaning, and they were discarding some old “Accounts & Ledgers” that were quite old. Some of them went back to the 1920s, if I remember correctly.
I didn’t want to “steal” someone else’s “garbage”, since in Canada that is a crime. But I couldn’t help myself, so I only took a single Ledger book. When I got home, I looked through it, and it was pure gold. Most of it was done by hand, some of it by typewriter. It was very, very old. But seeming as it was an Accounts & Ledger book, I felt that I couldn’t keep it, so I only took a few “receipts” or whatnot out of it, and brought the rest of the book back to where I had found it. And what I DID “keep”, I instantly “blacked out” EVERYTHING, every last bit of information that could be “personally identifiable”.
So while I’d love to tell you what or who this book was used for, I shall never betray that sacred trust, the trust of illicit garbage-thievery gone unnoticed for 15+ years. I said it was from a nearby Church, but I never said it had anything to do with the Church, only that it was next to the Church, and that someone at the Church must have thrown it out. In fact, it had nothing to do with the parish church, it was some other organization, which shall remain nameless.
I used the pieces I had kept in this painting, shown above, and quickly discarded the rest. It was part of a larger project, still ongoing believe it or not, tentatively called “The Legal Tender Project”. That too will get a post of its own, but nothing else needs be added for now. It’s just that I loved the visual effect of OLD PAPER, and in any case I always kept “old papers” in storage in my closet or somewhere. I will literally buy the newspaper every day for a whole year, or two or three years, then store them in plastic containers, then every now and then I “observe” and “inspect” them to see how they are faring, how they are yellowing and so forth. Then I pick through them, and I end up throwing out 95% of the newspapers, keeping only the ones that I think look really interesting, and that have interesting characteristics, whether it is in the content of the paper or some other attribute. I keep these boxes of old papers for decades sometimes, just because, as I said before “you never know when you’re going to need X”, whatever X is, whether it’s an old bus ticket from the 1980s, or the cover of a magazine from the 1970s. YOU NEVER KNOW.
IN GUISE OF A CONCLUSION, FOR NOW…
What is Philosophy?: The Birth of Extreme Philosophy
In conclusion, or “in guise” of a conclusion, here is a painting I made in the same period (or subperiod!) as before. It was a copy if you will of Rodin’s Thinker. Above and around the Thinker’s head are “pure abstractions”. In effect, what you see are forms and shapes and colors and textures “reminiscent” of my so-called “History-Paintings”. This was no accident. The idea here was that the Thinker, Rodin’s Thinker, was “thinking of the Concept(s) of History”. As you will realize, sooner or later, the impetus and driving force, the research problem and research question for my “History-Project” was nothing other than the following:
Is it possible to PAINT THE CONCEPT(s) OF HISTORY?
If I “painted the Concept(s) of History”, what would that look like?
Here Rodin’s Thinker is running the experiment, trying to “think the concept(s) of History”. What I did is that I tried to PAINT THEM. I still to this day have no idea if I ever succeeded in doing that. All I know is that 15 years down the line, I’m still trying to do the same thing I’ve been doing all along, since I first picked up art supplies and art materials when I was a young child.
My biography is simple so far: He came, he picked up a crayon or a pencil or a pastel or a paintbrush, and he drew/painted something. That has been true so far for 30+ years. That is my life story. The Man Who Painted X.
More to come…..
Sincerely,
A.G. (c) 2016
