I paint in what was once an old 12 X 12 shed, behind our house on Blackthorn Avenue in Toronto. I insulated and heated it, and it has served me well. The Blackthorn Paintings are the first series of work I made in there. That first winter (of 2001 / 2002), I painted furiously and completed close to 50 small paintings of various sizes. In the fullness of time, a sub-group of those paintings, all 16 X 20 inches, have come to be my favourates. On this page, you will find six of these pictures. Click the thumbnails to see bigger images and read a little about each. These paintings were done with oil paint, enamel house paint and urathane based plastic enamels. There is a rule when working with oil paintings that helps the painter avoid cracking - never lean on fat. I encouraged some of the effects one is supposed to avoid by often pouring or dripping lean paint over fat paint, or by adding a layer of faster drying enamels to a layer of not quite dry oil paint. The result was a remarkable rough and ready surface quality that helped define the nature of these works. I am going to say that these paintings are all rooted deeply in the land, in the landscape, in the forest floor, in trout streams and mud puddles. I exhibited many of these in an exhibition I had with Scott Childs at Loop Gallery, called Field and Stream. |
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