An Admission, and The Art-Writing Blooper Reel

I'm fond of Mary Cassatt.


While not nearly as jaw-dropping as the CAG in Vancouver describing a group of artists "exploring through exploration", the following sentence(pulled from this VoCA post) is wonderfully awful in it's inability to describe anything. Or maybe its ability to describe, through description, absolutely nothing:

"GARETH MOORE’s photographs of sculptures made from rubbish will become part of sculptural forms that draw attention to the images as archive."

I imagine these sentences to be written by curators on Friday Afternoon, or Monday Mornings. Beginning with the sentence "I don't know, go see the fucking work", they replace each word with a tile drawn from that Scrabble-like plastic bag that every curator has. On the tiles are printed things like "identity", "memory", "notions of", "transgressive".
Every word replaced.
Call it a night or wonder what the week's Facebook feed will bring.

Perspective on perspective

Tonight saw me using two pieces of technology I recently had dropped in my lap. Thankfully, as both were needed.
A printer from Ashley.
A digital camera from my dad.
With the camera I took a photo from which I extracted the above image. I printed it with my printer. Tomorrow I will work from this image in the studio.
Of course I've painted stripes before, but the starburst cut in Casual Friday Morning Coming Down got me thinking about about perspective, my more and more sturdy steps into painting with a brush and tube has had me thinking about illusionistic space.
The construction barriers allow a nice guide to perspective.

I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be raised, and educated in a place, Calgary, with an abundance of all the things you would not immediately choose for a painter's education, and with such a physical distance from the relics of painting's history.
When I search for a technique, my comfort is with the exercise books that taught me, with the exercises that demonstrated illusionistic perspective to me.
The worn out points that can't be erased, the Star Wars hyperspeed lines that get erased, the boxes, the white and black and white and black.
I feel shaky writing here again but I am back working at laundromat, so will likely be writing more.

I Eat Light

miriam and a dark fuzzy cloud named wil, originally uploaded by chopstickmary.

New Painting: Fuck This Mothafuckin' Pool

24" X 30" Acrylic & Foam On Board, 2007

Toronto Star Review Of Strawberry Alarmist Talk Radio

At the Galleries

A rather dim view of the future links "Current Affairs," by Linda Heffernan to "Strawberry Alarmist Talk Radio," by Wil Murray (both at Loop, 1174 Queen St. W., closes tomorrow). In fact, both artists are united in pointing out who is to blame – the media, at least indirectly.

In Affluent Effluent (2007) and There may be water over the bridge (2007), the Whitby-based artist positions tiny, distant people, seemingly relaxed and out for a walk on water – or across the surface of the painting itself. In the way the brush strokes were vigorously slashed across the canvas, the artist is sending an urgent message warning of something dangerous about to happen.

Wil Murray paints in order to outlast the "quotidian horror, confusion and terror." Faced with such an awful future the Montreal-based artist views his multi-layered works as if they were time capsules, so impenetrably dense and thick they'll outlast him by a long shot.

"Scattershot," by Lauri Lynnxe Murphy (Brayham Contemporary Art, 1270 Queen St E., until Sept. 2) asks us to go where few gallery visitors have ever gone before – deep into Toronto's east end. The gallery is the brainchild of curator Angela Brayham.

Although smallish, Brayham Contemporary may be on to something big: a burgeoning new art district to breathe fresh air into the entire scene. Influenced by pop culture, her work exists somewhere between painting and site-specific sculpture. "Each painting is like a phrase, word or sentence, or perhaps even a rebus, whose subtext expands beyond its obvious parts," she says.

-Peter Goddard
August 11, 2007