Globe & Mail Review

WIL MURRAY AT LOOP GALLERY

$600-$7,500. Until Aug. 12;

1174 Queen St. W., Toronto; 416-516-2581

It must be pretty devastating for artists to have their studio burn down, as happened to painter Wil Murray in Vancouver a few years ago. I don't mention it to drum up sympathy for him, but instead to suggest that the fire may well have galvanized his subsequent decamping to Montreal right afterward. As well, it may help explain the possibly overcompensatory, I've-got-nothing-to-lose madness of his current painting-constructions, which form an exhibition with the embarrassingly cute, sixties-referential title Strawberry Alarmist Talk Radio.

There is a joyful despair about Murray's convulsive pictures which, to quote the artist's gallery statement, "are thick with acrylic paint, insulating spray foam, glitter, glazes and collaged sections of paint, extending in places out from the board three to four inches." These heavily-laden paintings, which bear wonderfully annoying titles like Birthday Party Shouting Shooting, Why Are You Looking Up Here the Joke Is in Your Hand and Hey Girl You're Ruthless Now So Am I, Hey Hey, feature broken shards of plastic, great droopy, wanton organ-like excrescences, bubbles and blades of pigment, radiating fan-shaped blasts of bubble-gum colour, thundering roilings of what looks like rising oil smoke, and apparently anything else Murray could grab or contrive while he was working.

The energy the paintings generate is both exhilarating and exhausting. I do wish Murray hadn't felt compelled to add to his statement that pictures "take their cues" from three books: John Hawkes's The Lime Twig, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood and Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge. Three great books, for sure - but our being alerted to them here simply gets in the way of the locomotive force of Murray's amiably demented paintings.

By Gary Michael Dault

From globeandmail.com

July 28th, 2007

Toronto Show Opening At Loop Gallery

"Strawberry Alarmist Talk Radio" opened on Saturday at Loop Gallery in Toronto. I am suitably exhausted from a week of drink, installation, visiting and transport.
Some good introductions were had to the Toronto art world. A review will be forthcoming in the Globe & Mail by Gary Michael Dault on Saturday July 29th.
Some tentative steps toward working with a dealer there were made.

Thanks to Dayna and Elliott for the place to stay and the help with installation and all the with divining the meaning in the words and actions of Toronto art folks.
Thanks to Jackie and Jesse for the roses.

Why I Am Not A Poet

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

-Frank O'Hara

(1971)

The Jacobites.

I've not got much about painting today. But something just as good, that resulted in a lot of my titles.
Robespierre's Velvet Basement by the Jacobites is my favourite record of all time. I've listened to it almost daily for the past 2 years. Thanks to this post on the Commercial Zone blog, everyone can download it and love it as much as I do.
Somehow this record got missed by a lot of people. The prettiest songwriting I know.

Download

Track listing:
Track Listing

Disc 1

1. Big Store
2. Snow White
3. When the Rain Comes
4. Every Girl
5. Fortune of Fame
6. Where the Rivers End
7. Hearts Are Like Flowers
8. It'll All End Up in Tears
9. She Never Believes
10. All of My Life
11. Silken Sheets
12. Ambulance Station
13. Son of a French Nobleman

Disc 2

1. All the Dark Rags
2. Into My Arms
3. If I'm Crying
4. Romance
5. Country Girl
6. Sloth
7. Someone Who Cares
8. Before I Die
9. Pin Your Heart to Me
10. Road of Broken Dreams
11. One More String of Pearls
12. I Am Just a Broken Heart
13. Only Children Sleepin
14. Ooh la La

4 Years Ago Today

337 W. Pender Street, Vancouver. July 3rd, 2003. Mine and Ingrid Petro's studio and Ms. T's Cabaret and many others' spaces, burning.

Open Studio Photos, Twelve Hours of Drink 3

Photos by Ashley Bilodeau

Open Studio Photos, Twelve Hours of Drink 2

Photos By Debbie Wayne

Open Studio Photos, Twelve Hours of Drink 1

Photos By Debbie Wayne, James Schidlowsky