Painting The Concept(s) of History
The Story of The History-Project circa 2001-2004.
In July 2001, I moved into a new apartment with a close friend in Notre-Dame-de-Grace, Montreal. My friend was finishing her PhD. in philosophy, and I was working as an interdisciplinary artist.
The first order of business was unpacking the boxes and organizing our living space. The second order of business, though, for me personally, was setting up a studio space inside the apartment.
So I quickly made a makeshift workspace by stacking some unopened boxes and a large suitcase, and covering it with an old bed-sheet. Voila, I had a primitive art studio! I could start working immediately (it was imperative that I not lose any continuity in my art practice during the move).
As I was unpacking boxes and for lack of unused canvases for my new paintings, I had the brilliant idea of taking a box-cutter and taking apart a cardboard box into flat pieces, to use as a support for painting.
This simple idea and action would propel me into 20+ years of continuous art and research and would give birth to one of my first real, mature, grand scale artistic projects called The History-Project.
I had never really painted on corrugated cardboard before. It was interesting. I started with acrylic paints because it was simpler to use than oil and allowed me to work much more quickly. I found that doing rough sketches on cardboard too was effortless and quick.
As I now had an endless supply of cardboard pieces as support, I entered into an intense period of creative exploration. I quickly developed a new style, which I came to call the “History-Painting”. Here was the first History-Painting done in acrylic and felt marker on canvas (The other two images above are of the first two oil paintings I made in the new series that came to be called The History-Project):
I worked on this series of paintings from July 2001 until October 2004, when I left that apartment in NDG. I must have made hundreds of paintings, drawings, sketches filling entire notebooks, and paintings of every shape and size.
I even made installations and clay sculptures, and all the while, I was also writing and recording hundreds of songs and writing fiction. The History-Project project was truly an interdisciplinary project in three main modes of expression: IMAGE | SOUND | TEXT.
I would begin working on a novel whose title was the same as the overarching, interdisciplinary project, The History-Project. I made concept albums of songs for the project. I also produced a lot of research. I explain.
What was going on behind the scenes was that my friend was finishing her PhD. in philosophy, and she introduced me to countless philosophical authors I had never read before. I started reading a great deal of philosophy as well as studying history, art history, and historiography.
The result was hundreds of pages of original research, alongside the serial, interdisciplinary art project, an “art-research project” which makes up the whole of The History-Project and concludes this brief story of the work I did in Montreal circa 2001-2004.
I didn’t know it at the time, but The History-Project would become foundational in my development as a person and as an artist-researcher. I would go on to spend the next 20 years building on that foundation, and it would take me to places I could never have dreamed of going in my lifetime. All because I needed canvases and used a box-cutter to take apart some cardboard boxes as I was unpacking after a move, wanting desperately to get back to work as quickly as I could and start a new series of paintings. And to get back to the beginning, what was the premise that started The History-Project as a series of paintings? Simply put, it was the idea of “Painting The Concept(s) of History”. More about that later.
A.G. (c) 2001-2023. All Rights Reserved.
