ARTIST STATEMENT

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Especially pertinent to my overall program of work is the strategy of using existing cultural objects – film, art, and narratives – that already have systems of signs and signifiers, existing languages. These languages or codes can then be applied – like the artist’s palette of colours – to reconstruct, remake or alter the dynamic of the conversation. This approach allows me a chance to communicate to viewers in a common vocabulary and offers a point of entry into the ongoing dialogues that make up contemporary culture.

I’ve been painting Canadian animals off and on over the past four decades, mostly because they are poetic, emotional, beautiful and often an ignored subject in popular culture and contemporary art. Some of my wildlife paintings can be found in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Agnes Etherington in Kingston or the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

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In my earlier videos I worked from films created by Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Luc Godard that were circulating in the public domain and were/are important to me because of their narrative drives and aesthetics. To make ‘112 Second, The Birds’ (2014) and ‘Seeing Seberg’ (2017) I grabbed image stills from the two aforementioned directors' motion pictures and used their source imagery to make my paintings, then using Final Cut Pro Editing Suite software I re-inserted the grabbed-oil-painted-picture back into the original footage thereby heightening the phenomenological aspect of translating one visual media into another so as to potentially heighten the viewing experience for the viewer. (see painting and video links on this website for more detail).