Dick Dack Toe

What I make is to painting what Star Trek's 3-dimensional chess game is to chess.
No, what I make is to painting what the original Windows 3-D Tic Tac Toe was to on-paper Tic Tac Toe when I first booted up my Dad's new computer in 1993.
It also has something to with Philip K. Dick and taking speed....how if you go fast enough you can make time's thread dimensional and move around it. Time outside of time. Making sure all the information is there by moving so that all the information can be read by moving.
Looking as opposed to watching

Which New Painting?

To chase the new, to value the contemporary is as intentional as deciding to be an ancient Egyptian. Don’t put it past me, bouffant black hair, eyes ringed in black, holding a staff or a can of beer, maybe.
Historical movements, constructed in the workshop of art history, are encapsulated, started and finished without us. We are positioned after their occurrence. Our claims to contemporary practices are made by our proximity to their inception, how soon we knew them, how early we believed them. In historical movements, we are given the relief of a death never felt in person, in new work, the hope of a birth without a life we’re responsible to. Unless we really like the baby.
I’ve not really not been a fan of new painting. By the same token, I am not a fan. In fact, I’ve always loved new painting as much I needed to in order to paint, and show my work, and feel less alone. I've loved new painting to capacity while I wondered which "New Painting" the internal imaginary interviewer was asking about.
I understand most easily new painting when I can see it within miles of my home. I can imagine how the work got there after the last show on the same walls, and can ask questions that ground the work near my own. “Where is his studio?” “Where are they from? Here? Where I'm from?”
I have to figure out less about the how when I see new paintings nearby. Old men don’t travel to other cities to watch construction sites, the most interesting ones are found nearest to your house because you can remember last week when the street wasn’t a gaping pit and you crossed it where you liked as long as the cars weren’t trying to kill you.
Maybe old men would travel if they could. Maybe old men who watch construction sites have been broke so long that travel doesn't even enter the equation. Maybe they keep their minds of travel down at the construction site, watching with the other old men. Now I'm just being cute like Calvino, or the lyrics to all that new adult contemporary music coming from Canada.

I like painting.
No much of it, though.
They hit hardest near to home.
It is hard to tell with paintings, when they all hang on the wall kind of the same, when they are from. The smell can give it away.
Sometimes the smell gives away that they were painted last week.

I go to galleries a lot. More than I go to movies, less than I imagine art historians go. Mostly I go on sunny days when I am in another city, or on Tuesdays when I am in Montreal.
I keep trying to walk into a gallery and have this all change. To be knocked on my ass and care more about what did it than my ass pain. Or my embarrassment. That's like feeling self-concious when you're drunk, and trying to drink it away because you heard that booze lowers your inhibitions
Maybe this is why I don't collect painting.


* The top photo is from the opening of "the strange space that keeps us together" at the Belkin Satellite. In the photo is Colin, Me , and Jacqueline Mabey. I don't know who took it. The show is still up and you should all go see it before April 6th.

Dragon Fruit, Rose Apples, Roseeeeee, Lions Eating Horses

As I am in Vancouver, with a stomach full of unfamiliar exotic fruits and cheese and wine, I am apt to give answers to interviews a little differently than usual.
Andrea Carson over at VoCa sent me 5 interview questions, and reviewed my work a bit on her blog. Vancouver cast a long shadow over the answers to these questions, read them here.
I am overjoyed to be heading into my opening tomorrow at the Belkin Satellite with a post on my work that includes and image of "Lion Attacking a Horse".
See you there.

New Painting: Super Special Chat Twenty Dollars

Super Special Chat Twenty Dollars, 34" X 47" Acrylic & Foam on Board

Back in Calgary, on my Mother's couch watching cable, I was struck by some familiar strangeness in a Looney Tunes cartoon.
It was the one with Foghorn Leghorn and the Dog and the impossibly hungry weasel(possibly my favourite cartoon character). The dog has convinced the weasel that he should not chase the little chicks, but rather go after bigger game, in the form of Foghorn Leghorn. In the midst of all of this, the dog occasionally pauses to deliver a few lines directly to the viewer.
I would say "directly to the camera", but this being an animated cartoon, the camera is non-existent.
This means an animator decided to have a dog he was animating speak as if he were pausing from some scripted scenario to deliver a few lines to a non-existent camera.
I find a corollary in what the animator is doing, by having the dog speak to an imaginary camera, to what I am doing in the studio lately. Applying paint skins, draped and folded, coming far off the board and towards the viewer, mimics the dog's pause and delivery. While both the application of paint directly to the painting - poured or applied with brush to render illusionistic form - and the attachment of paint skins are both from my hand, the former adheres very strongly to an official narrative, and the latter to some subtext or supertext(?) that feels a bit like Rauschenberg adding a bucket and other items to an otherwise typically painted painting, but even more like that Looney Tunes dog.
The attached paint skins are the dog turning from the action, to deliver the very necessary joke possible only in an aside by a character drawn and imagined in the same incubator as the rest of the narrative.

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

Screaming at rainbows or pregnant women

I met J. on what was my headiest trip home for Christmas. We spent a few days in the entry way of a door left unguarded, and I came home to Montreal.
I started to pour myself into the mailbox across the street, and the one at the post office, hoping that some far-off mailman would, in turn, pour me into hers or retrieve her to come flopping and rubber chicken like out of my mailbox. We spoke on the phone, she didn't write back.
Months passed happily this way.
I went back to Calgary, to be terrified by the gaps that lay between her and the her I'd been writing to, and me and the me who'd been writing. We stopped speaking. I continued to write her and then stopped. I began writing here, in the beginning I was still writing on this blog to her.
I had never written so much, and the beauty of letters is that I can't even remember anything from them besides fragments. My house is filled with unsent letters, they surprise me stuffed in books and drawers.
To sit and write to someone, unanswered(or maybe even unsent), you build a them to write to. And you build a you to write from. To continue to write when no hope of answer exists, you build without any new information, in a vacuum. The she I wrote to was me, in her clothing. The me that I wrote from was me in my clothing. Both imaginary, all me.
Writing those letters changed my relationship to the studio and to working in it.
To find myself having built another's veneer strangely enough to be called "other" was terrifying. I could not even worry about violence done to her, as she had ceased to be another months before. It was terrifying because it was so well built I counted it as another person, as her, for months.
This killed outside. There wasn't and isn't any outside. It is always all me.
Just as the love of love songs is misleading, as the other that is being sung about is the constructed other of the self singing, my attributing otherness to accidents in painting was misleading as I have spent years in the studio, and those years have built control.
As I constructed a veneer of J. to cover the mysteries I couldn't access because of silence, I constructed a veneer of accident to cover the mysteries of what paint did when I wasn't looking, touching, acting.
In the end the only unintentional part was the construction of the veneers because it is too slow to see and works seamlessly from some space where you can claim knowing.
At some point I was near enough to J. and accident to name them, now those theys go by the names "me" and "me" because in stopping writing to her, and in stopping chasing fleeting accident, nothing is left but the veneer.

Dots or Stripes. Stripes or Dots.

Insomnia is funny.
In a recent conversation with Jesse I mentioned that every painting hits a point where in order to continue, some time has to be spent laboriously painting. Specifically laborious. Recently...well, for years...this has meant dots(variously masked, painted freehand, layered) or stripes(of all widths, regular, irregular, layered).
The conversation took a turn that put this in some moral light, but I think that forgets a lot for the sake of a very pop psychology interpretation of what goes on.
My words: "Like I've been coasting too long(in the making of the painting) on flash moves.
Jesse's: "Funny how that moral thing comes up"

A much larger recent concern of mine. Well beyond this conversation.
There's really no reason to do anything to a painting. it doesn't particularly matter what I do do to it.
It isn't moral because it is not yet anything. Supposing that anything I do to a painting will do anything is at best fleeting. I will do more or not do more. There is no grand narrative to weigh any mark's value, or not one yet.
The studio is a kind of non-space. There's no eyes, and there's no secrets because there's simply no one around to keep a secret from. I try at once to disappear and treat the painting like something other than me.
The labour is not so neurotic. Only the soreness of my back and staggering blindness exiting the studio differentiate these nights from others.

I have great difficulty connecting the dots. It all comes out like nihilism, but I mean to say it all with a lilting tone.
I cannot see the future from my studio window, or looking in to it. Hell, even the paintings won't give up the ghost until the end.

Mark Making and Shaky Personal Pronoun Use

The inevitability and simultaneity of the single final image, read by the static viewer looking down time, foreshortens the creation narrative to a point that sequential reading is ridiculous. The narrative is seen simultaneously through its end. Redemptive ends, modest and underwritten from the beginning, cloud the viewer’s eyes with their celebrations of post-death space. My actions, the removal and re-attaching of sections from the same painting, confuse the sequence even further, nudges a sequential reading into the vicinity of the absurd.

Without the possibility of moving along a narrative, as in books or songs or films, inconsistency in personal pronoun use in mark making confuses and celebrates the inevitable heroism of the final composition.

Marks made as:
The I and We of modernism.
The You of pop-art.
The They of contemporary painting.
He as someone outside of me.
He as me, referred to by myself, outside.
I in We’s clothing.
We with I insides.

All of these contained by the inevitable singular end. This embracing I allows the cell walls of affectation, authentic, ironic and sincere to dissolve and allows me to travel between pronouns, and act simultaneously within several pronouns without pursuing the simple translation between two from one to another. Transubstantiation and transmutation are so much more fun than translation.

To attempt, in mark making, consistency in personal pronoun use is to allude to an outside narrative the viewer could move along. An authoritative narrative that reduces the painting to a document describing the irrelevancy of its own form.

Pardon Secured...I swear this is the end of my Redemption Song

So, if one looks down time and into my paintings (temporal depth not illusionistic depth, although that may be coming), then something I’ve been saying for years indicates best what I’m on about. The redemptive end bit. Or, at least, what I'm not on about.

When I talk about the finishing a painting, I have said for some time that it is not when “angels are singing” that the real end happens. This loud, triumphant end is inevitably false, mistrusted and eventually dismissed no matter how grand and seductive.

This glorious end, doubted and having been strived for, is too hard to look through, you could not look down the time of the painting through all the angels swaying and singing and lighting firecrackers. The smoke of the glorious redemption is too thick and disallows the reading of temporal depth.

Engulfs and forces a single qualitative judgment of each mark as it is made. The assessment of a mark’s position in relation to the redemptive end ONLY. This perpetuates a popular lie that paintings are a single image, representing an instant, a snapshot. In this to trust the glorious end mean that marks serve the purpose of this lie, they flatten and defer to a future event in which their relationship to every other mark made in the name of redemption will be sanctified. All other marks will have, by the nature of glorious redemption, been eradicated. To paint this way takes advantage of the viewer by playing all games toward a lie.

The redemptive end is not phenomenal or glorious because it was never in doubt, a paintings end, its redemption is secured by its beginning. There are marks made in between which seek the redemptive end, there are extraneous marks whose position in relation to this end are unclear, and all are at once irrelevant, and the marks without which there would be no painting.

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

Barnes Mann and Hawkes

Most of my thoughts, written down in gaps between customers on dozens of small notebook pages at the Laundromat, are occupied with two subjects: narrative and redemption, and how each relates to the other and to painting. This will be most of the content of this blog. The small pieces that are by-product of this thinking.



These thoughts are infected with the writing of three authors: Djuna Barnes, Thomas Mann, and John Hawkes.

Mark-Making and Prayer

In love, I speak many words as small prayers. They describe in their distance from the romantic weather that soaks and dries us both, all the unspeakable things I wish love could be.
In painting there are marks that serve a similar purpose. Describing in their distance from the guileless marks made before them the type of mark I would make in this spot if I were going to make a mark on the painting I have been imagining.
Sometimes prayer is foisted on a mark. By changing the marks around it, it is hollowed of any original value and made to serve as prayer. This is an impressively violent way of making marks. If thorough, it makes subsequent marks appear to have been prayed for. When the violence is through, I am relieved to find I am someone for whom prayers are answered.

There are also sentimental marks, they comfort me by recalling past marks on paintings whose redemption is already secured.

Painting As Obituary

Jackson Pollock Alchemy, 1947


When I am in my painting I’m not aware of what I am doing. It is only after I see what I have been about. I have no fears of making changes, destroying the image etc. Because the painting has a life of its own.
Jackson Pollock, 1947

MANY lives of its own?
HAD many lives of its own?
Like the city street a traveler sees for the first time. First glimpses construct for him “the street”. All future changes will be compared to this original. As if this was the original state of the street. Time changes this street as the traveler begins to understand the quotidian decisions and catastrophic accidents that have constructed it before his arrival. Building a narrative of past and future still fraught with lingering mysteries around his first glimpsed eternal marker of present.
When I have lived somewhere long enough to feel my own feet wearing down the streets I walk on each day. When I can imagine the thousands of other feet before my own. When I know what was there before, and how it was eliminated. When I know what is there now will be replaced in time.
I am terrified.
The finished painting is like this first glimpse, but without the terror of continual alteration by you or any other. With the relief of something you will not wreck, improve, or change by looking. The relief of not having to act, to encourage, to put in motion or to stop. The relief of not being asked to choose the form of what you see. The painting has no physical future. It allows you unlimited time.
Earlier I wrote that painting should not be an obituary. But no, the painting is different kind of obituary(here’s where the lack of good analogy for painting falls flat). As obituary, painting’s cohesion as a single image without the beginning or end of a written text can address the unlimited narratives of its own lives in being made.
By what is still visible in each painting, all narratives of making are described. If eliminated, they are still suggested by those still visible.
Battering a painting into a single narrative is a redundant act of heroic violence I am loath to attempt.