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

Hochelagalaga

There is a point that is reached in the making of a painting that I can only compare to the feeling you get when, after playing Galaga for several hours you realize that you no longer pay any attention to your ship along the bottom of the screen. You no longer glance down to see where it is, as you know from the feeling of your hands and the shots flying up the screen.
In painting it is like you no longer pay attention to the overall composition, or even bother to hang it on the wall to try to see the next marks. You just mix paint and pour it, or remove it using your periphery vision and the more than likely incorrect remembrances of the night-before's work to guide you....but you trust what lies beyond the man being revealed behind the curtain.

I did, after all, go to school in Western Canada

Nearly all of my knowledge of paintings comes from books, and the reproductions they contain. It is more remarkable for me to have seen the work of an artist I invoke as influential than not. Maybe this accounts for the sway that the NNP has over my work(for that matter, this may explain the week or so of imitative work after visiting any artist’s studio, or gallery. Right now my colour work looks like Molinari, as I just saw his retrospective at he MDLC Hochelaga-Maisonneuve). I have seen a lot of their work.
My work is becoming increasingly difficult to photograph. I am making paintings that reproduce poorly. Not a concern in the studio, but one of great concern given how much sway photographs of paintings are given in jury selections, grant applications, magazine articles.

Going to see someone else’s paintings has always been secondary to the psychological and monetary weather patterns that will hasten or delay my trips to the studio to work on my own.
Out of my mouth fly statements which prop up the ideal of paintings being best, or only critiqued when one has seen them with one’s own eyes.
I wrote to Piri Halasz recently and included images of my work. She kindly and politely responded that she could not comment on any work she had not seen in person. As I am apt to do, I responded to the ill-defined question posed by the imaginary interviewer in my head: “This is the only respectable answer she could give, I would have discounted her as a critic had she given any other”. This answer positioned me in the heads of the non-existent audience as an authentic painter drowning in a sea of illiterate conceptualism. A position that is feeling shakier and shakier...no wait: more and more unwanted.


But in secret I couldn’t understand her inability to make devils or angels of paintings she had never seen. I had after all made a champion of Pia Fries(photo above) or Rosenquist(photo top left) and a hack of Dubuffet and Clifford Still without even seeing a stroke.