Before I Was A Painter

There wasn't one painting or drawing in my application to school.
In 1996, a year before art school and few minutes after half-reading "Discipline and Punish", I adopted the name Panopticon and began sending mail art to anyone who would give me their address. I was really into Throbbing Gristle and mail art worked so well with all the industrial noise music I was making. It started as cards with photocopied images on the front and a two or three word message inside, and culminated with me sending out nearly 40 of the baggy/razor blade/tag combinations shown above.
People really didn't think about privacy the same way as they might now, and no one remembers giving out their address. So I had a few people worried, and one even drove past my house(I'd listed a return address in hopes of anyone reciprocating, no one ever did).

Later, a second project came up where I put a bit of water in with the blades so they would rust during delivery. One night on mushrooms at a movie theatre I remember pulling out a pack of rusted razor blades from my pocket in plain view of some folks I didn't know so well.

Thanks so much to Joel Jackson and Heather Kvill for sending these photos. I had to blur the address because my mom still lives there.

The photo that sums up my school years.

L to R: Wil Murray, Angela Yee, Heather Kvill, Miriam Bankey, Chad Roberts, Wenda Hodgins
(1999)

Ode to My Mom: Observation Nurseries of Calgary

Even my immersion in it was complete, and aimless. There was no outside, no space that wasn't in it.
My Mom worked for, and eventually directed a non-profit society in Calgary called Observation Nurseries of Calgary. Their method, as I remember it, was to form a once-a-week space in church basements around town where children, brought by their mom, were allowed to travel through the various activity areas(water table, sand table, painting), undirected, aimlessly, minimally monitored. At the end of the day we would sing together, the only prescribed activity.
Given that it was my Mom who worked there, this unstructured play and its value was present daily for both me and my sister, Amy. Not once-a-week in church basement, but the usual quotidian state of things in our house.
We were not a particularly hippy family. While I can still taste wheat germ and sugar-free health food lollipops, we had nothing on some folks I know.
Left to my own devices in play, structured activities always felt cursory and un-involved. If I could not spend the whole day at something because someone was encouraging me to move on to something else, it was too distancing for me to ever feel like something I had actually done. A personal relationship to something was impossible from the start if the end was pre-determined.
In art school, I started to explore the aimless in painting. My artist statements began to contain lines about the disappointment I felt at achieving anything I had intended to accomplish. Goaless painting, aimless work was so outside the mode of work I saw all around me that I believed I had thought it up myself with a little help from Heather Kvill's description of the methodology of Graham Peacock.
Years later it dawned on me that Mom had been a major influence on this way of working.
These days I never get to the studio if an end to the hours spent there is pre-determined. I will never meet anyone for drinks "after the studio" if the want me to be anything besides resentful for their having capped my aimlessness. While the purity of aimless work is always eroding and and returning, it never leaves my practice.
I mistrust directed activities, sketches, and costumes.
There's some rigorous patience that this bred.
There's something there too, just beyond my fingertips that is about duration and solitude and why I can paint again and again.
Truthfully, it may be because of my failure at my first chosen vocation. After asking me what I would like to be when I grew up, my sister complained to my Mom about my ridiculous choice. She answered in deadly seriousness: "He can be whatever he wants when he grows up, even an Elephant".

PS. Thinking about this, and having some conversations with my sister about it, I find that another common theme in my work -or at least its existence as thing-to-be-looked-at- has some ties to this.
The difference I often speak of between anyone and everyone. Or "for everyone" and "for anyone"(the prettiest chasm). I cannot yet connect this and that, but feel the juicy strings between them. Maybe that whole wolf-in-sheep's-clothing, sheep-in-wolf's-clothing, wolf-in-wolf's-clothing, sheep-in-sheep's-clothing, sheep, old wolf friend called "accident and intention".

What Came Before After

The summer heat and my working 60 hours a week meant that I spent three months working almost exclusively on one painting. Entitled “The Profit I Raise Out Of This Boy Will Burn Your Eyes Clean”(studio photo above, 84” X 48”), it was the impetus to dig a little deeper into an ongoing discussion I have had with friends over the years about how the possibility of narrative in my painting, and how it differs significantly from music, literature or film. Thanks to Gavin, Justin, Jesse and Heather for their patience on this subject.

Music, literature and film are each contained by a beginning and an end. Each of these forms bring their audience along through time, their form predetermines a clear beginning and end point. A book is opened and begun from the first page, and read to the last. Even if you open the book to the middle and read backwards to the beginning and stop three pages from it, you are playing along a linear line.

In my paintings, the sole comparable narrative is the one that the painting tells of its own creation. The narrative of creation is seen in the singular image of the painting. You look down time, through the last marks made. The linear representation of the narrative is foreshortened and flattened into the single image.
Until now, the solely additive process of layering of paint meant that any mark would have to b protected through until the end if they were to be seen at all in the final image. Switching to acrylics last year, I began to remove sections to reveal older sections underneath. Compositionally this meant uncovering elements from which the subsequent marks had drawn their position, form, colour etc. and worked not as a replacement for the protection of marks(it would be impossible for me to hold in my head what each layer held underneath the visible), but a new way to include older marks later on. Even, in the case of “Making Love To His Eagle”(photo below), finish a painting by revealing the very first layer of paint.

Working on “The Profit I Raise Out Of This Boy Will Burn Your Eyes Clean” this summer a further and more elaborate confusion to the narrative the viewer would look down presented itself. The final mark made on the painting was re-applying a very central section from the first weeks of the painting in exactly the same spot it had originally appeared.

I can’t tell if this destroys the simile between the narratives of different forms or how it elaborates the one I am working with.


This post represents the beginning of what eventually led to the following posts:
Painting As Obituary
Mark Making and Prayer
Thanks To Flannery O'Connor: A Redemption Song