Sambro

Using the car studio you can travel down roads that 
would be otherwise very hard to get to. I found this view of the village of Sambro across the harbour on a beautiful late fall morning. 

The advancing storm was pushing clouds north into view and the winds had stirred the harbour to its depths. The sun danced and I worked a quickly as possible to record the spectacle.

Form

It turns out that among other things I am a conceptualist. I say that after reading that some artists who identify as conceptualists made lists. The idea of lists being art took a while to settle with me. The lists I made were always in my mind. I had no way of knowing that I was operating on the very edge of contemporary art practice. At the time there was a joke circulating in public that talked about a conceptualist painter presenting a white canvas to an audience. It was said to be a painting of a white cow in a snowstorm. Artists had surely pushed the form to the limit.

I was somewhat aware of the long history of artists working on site creating work in series but for some reason my training to that point suggested a opposite very slow and considered studio process involving sketching and preliminary drawings, underpainting, colouring and varnishing before framing.

It was one thing to make a pencil sketch in a very short period but the process did not translate to paint as easily for me even though I had made on site work almost since I began my art practice. Something didn't fit but while working to accelerate my painting process, paintings and drawings came to be seen as my lists. Lists of ideas that give form. 

The garden around our house once again allowed daily access to subjects providing a chance for free exploration of ideas around form and information. A list of soft  summer air.

Information Overload

Recently, deep down in the closet a silhouette of myself revealed itself. The silhouette was created as part of a project in elementary school sometime about the time I was about five or six years old. The teacher projected our profile onto a sheet of paper using a lamp. 

Sitting between the light source and the paper was my job. It was most important to hold as still as possible while she traced my shadow outline on the sheet of paper. 


Many years later I was amazed by the simplicity and also the complexity of the information collected. A simple outline contour drawing had created a unique portrait. In my mind questions arose about recording and transmitting information.  

I wondered how much or how little information is preserved and conveyed when the outline is the only piece of information recorded. Of course the first piece of information collected is the start point. Once you move away from the point you already have two pieces of information. 

As the line continues around the object shape and space are described. 
A relationship between inside and outside is exposed.  

When colour or tone is added the object  information expands again

allowing a relationship that describes foreground and background. Information is piling up.

Halifax Harbour Sketches

I have been working from the car sketching along the harbour. There are a few sites that can be accessed easily exposing a vibrant industrial port. Giant cranes and equipment that manipulate large sea containers into position move about the deck with purpose.

The movement of the equipment parallels training in life drawing when during a session the model would change positions every twenty or thirty seconds. The object was not to capture every detail of the pose but the overall energy or flow of the view. 

The drawing does not contain the same romantic associations directed by gesture drawings of the human figure. It is constrained by the space of the car studio and a need to restrict the paint drift to the car interior which is already colourful enough.

The division of space that occurs where the objects of man intersect and link the land and sky is very interesting to me. The vast industrial landscape of the harbour provides a unique opportunity to follow this interest as well as being a foil to work with natural elements of the forest and garden.