Natural Light in The Studio

See it in the flesh, and in photograph next week at Sur La Montagne in Berlin, and in May at Skew Gallery in Calgary.

Art dies in the summer, but look at this new painting

In My Culture Food Was Not Very Important @ NEXT Chicago

Skew Gallery is hanging my work at the NEXT fair in Chicago this weekend. Go get yer mind blown at booth 8B.

Go say howdy.

This Tiny Boy Just Left For NEXT Chicago

Just sent my work to Skew Gallery for the NEXT Chicago art fair, running April 29th to May 2nd.

My first Chicago fair, so I sent a brand new piece with a skinny child playing a harmonica. Fucking bluesy as hell: In My Culture Food Was Not Very Important.

Just finished it last week.

Chicago makes me think of Wax Trax records and Bobby Conn. I wish I could go.

If You Lived Free Or Died Here You Would Be Home Or Dead By Now

If You Lived Free Or Died Here You Would Be Home Or Dead By Now, 2010

Acrylic, Photographs and Polyethylene Foam on Board

80" X 80" X 18"

Photo: Joe Dilworth

New Painting: She Broadcasts Love At A Six Hour Distance...

She Broadcasts Love At A Six Hour Distance So I Can Stop Telling Time on TV Clocks, 2010
85" X 63" X 7". Acrylic On Board.
Photo by Yannick Grandmont

Click image to see larger version

Skew Gallery - Calgary, Canada

I am very pleased to announce that I will be represented by Skew Gallery in my hometown of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Look for my work in an exhibition there this summer presented as part of the Sled Island Music Festival.

Image: If You Wax It And Tan It The Scars Are Sure To Shine Brightly Tonight, 2010. 83.5 X 49 X 8 inches. Acrylic & Polyethylene Foam On Boar. Photo by Yannick Grandmont

Some recent images: Work at The Studio

January is the mos productive month of the year, and my time away from the studio allowed a few things to ferment. More construction, more ambitious composition and painting curtains.

"Silver" exhibition Opening at Diane Farris Tonight. New collages from Berlin.

Silver December 3 – 23 Artist Reception: December 3, 2009, 6 – 8 pm Diane Farris Gallery ends 2009 with a lot to celebrate. In its 25th Anniversary year, the gallery has the same energy that first made it an exciting new art venue in 1984. The gallery continues the tradition of introducing new artists to Vancouver while featuring the best of those who have been part of its cast since the beginning. Silver presents both large and small-scale artworks by gallery artists Shannon Belkin, Dale Chihuly, Judith Currelly, John Dennison, Angela Grossmann, Kathryn Jacobi, Nick Lepard and Wil Murray. Silver also welcomes two new sculptors to the gallery: internationally-acclaimed New York artist Ilan Averbuch and Seattle-based sculptor Joseph McDonnell. Ilan Averbuch is well-known for massive outdoor pieces composed of granite, stone, lead and wood beams. They are truly fantastic in nature and in scope. Two drawings in this exhibit demonstrate his mastery of spatial balance as well as his playful, ironic nature. In the courtyard, two major works by Seattle artist Joseph McDonnell introduce his dramatic, almost Cubist sculptures of metal and granite. Their pit-marked, weathered surfaces and teetering forms capture a sense of ancient, primordial symbols and lost civilizations. New paintings by Shannon Belkin, Judith Currelly and Angela Grossmann are featured along with works on paper by Wil Murray, Nick Lepard, Kathryn Jacobi and John Dennison. Murray’s popular collages juxtapose images from National Geographic magazines with photographs of his paintings in maquette-like compositions. Kathryn Jacobi shows prints from her Baby series, while Nick Lepard presents charcoal drawings done as studies for his large oil portraits. Currelly’s large-scale work on wood panel depicts a polar bear reigning over a frozen landscape. At the feminine extreme of the exhibit, Vancouver painter Shannon Belkin has created a lovely soft study of dogs on a plush pink pillow.

Twice As Much Faggot, Twice as Much Drugs

Settling into Berlin nicely after a very good, very hazy art fair in Toronto.
My second arrival here has been even more spectacular than the last. It rains here, but I've not felt a drop.
I stopped checking the weather or the date.
The painting pictured is very big. You can click on the photo and see it bigger. It was exhibited at Art Toronto and in my show at Galerie PUSH. I can never remember it's proper name: Them Faggot Drug Them New Faggot Standard Breasts Shape Drug(144" X 89" X 14" Acrylic & Polyethylene Foam On Board, 2009).
Photo by Yannick Grandmont

New Painting: If They Bottled Sex With The Curator...

If They Bottled Sex With The Curator I Would Buy It But Spill It On The Way Home, 2009
Acrylic & Foam On Board, 49" X 59" X 7"

To be sold at ESSE magazine's 25th anniversary auction November 11th at Musee De Beaux Arts in Montreal.

ESSE Magazine 25th Anniversary Auction

"If They Bottled Sex With The Curator I Would Buy It But Spill It On The Way Home"(pictured above) will be featured in ESSE magazine's 25th anniversary auction this fall. Happening November 11th, at the Musee Des Beaux Arts in Montreal. This piece will also be exhibited in my show at Galerie PUSH in September.

Details: If They Bottled Sex With The Curator I Would Buy It But Spill It On The Way Home. Acrylic & Foam on Board. 49" X 59" X 7" (click on image fore larger version)

New Painting: What The Dents In Your Head Can Tell Us

(click image to see larger version)

What The Dents In Your Head Can Tell Us, 2009
52" X 43" X 6", Acrylic & Foam On Board

New Painting: "Cathode Ray Cure For The Lust-Bent Hangover"

(click image to see larger version)

Cathode Ray Cure For The Lust-Bent Hangover, 2009
62" X 53" X 9", Acrylic & Foam On Board

New Painting: Super Special Chat Twenty Dollars

Super Special Chat Twenty Dollars, 2008
Acrylic & Foam on Board, 35" X 47"

New Painting: Terror Bred His Sardonicism....

Terror Bred His Sardonicism That Weasel Sees Him As Food, 2008
Acrylic & Foam on Board, 48" X 54"

In the lead up to my November show "Why I Am Not A Painter" at the Patrick Mikhail Gallery, I will be posting images of a few of the paintings I've completed this year.
Yes, the title refers to Foghorn Leghorn, my ongoing obsession. Click on the image for a larger version.

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.

New Painting: "Intention Grading For The Modern Road Re-Surfacer"

New Painting: "Sexing Up the Lipsticked Pork"

New Painting: Looking back On Your First Desktop Theme It Smelled Like A Child's Potty

"He was a medical tinker and no longer wore his half face in the fishbowl light of the amphitheater. He put his hands to the hot stove. If there was one last operation to perform, he thought, what would it be, since he had spread anatomy across a table like a net and crumpled a pair of deflated lungs into a ball. There was none he knew. If a single body could bear all marks of his blade and if it carried only the organs of his dissection, his life work would seesaw across the floor under tresses of arms and ventricles hung from the shoulders, would turn the other emasculated cheek. Slowly he rolled his sleeves and reaching around the stove dropped celluloid cuffs on the bunk tumbled with newspapers and a khaki blanket"

From: "The Beetle Leg" by John Hawkes NDP239, 1951.