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Artist Statement - Toronto '95
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The Brush-Knife works explore a relation between brush and knife and the process of creation from subtraction. Wallpapers of various colours and patterns are successively layered into large panel five to ten layers thick. The top layer is then painted with several different partially obstructed coats of flat and glossy white house paint. At this stage the panel is like a section of standard house wall with its many layers of strange wallpapers and previous crude paint jobs.

A large ink painting of naturalistic imagery such flowers is painted onto the top surface of the panel. The surface is then cut, torn and excavated according to the relation between the colours or tones in the ink painting corresponding with various colours of the wallpaper in the panel. In this way the colours and composition of the original ink painting are excavated from the panel by cutting into and revealing the various layers of wallpaper.

My recent artwork is a series of paintings done with gold and silver paints on advertising billboard proof sheets. These works are an expansion of the themes that were explored in the Brush-Knife works, but in reverse. The proof sheet backgrounds are very dense and complex compositions of layered commercial imagery created at random during the printing process. My paintings are compositions of the plants and creatures found in Nature such as flowers, grape vines, fish and frogs, painted in a spontaneous ink brush style. The work is created by applying the bright, peaceful, naturalistic paintings onto the dark and chaotic, commercial graphic backgrounds. The background images are multi-layered, polychrome graphics and the various painted metallics reflect different qualities of light, creating works with great visual depth.

The backgrounds are composed of random arrangements of commercial graphic elements each of which represent portions of larger commercial products and systems. The purpose of billboard sheets is to produce an association of value with the commercial imagery such as corporate logos and product representations. In the press proof sheets, many commercial images collide to reinforce or cancel each other out. Superimposed on these backgrounds, the paintings are done by hand, with the glow of gold and silver, copper and bronze. Value association fluctuates between the hand painting and the commercial graphics.

The works achieve a resolution between the different qualities by the use of the metallics. Gold, silver and copper are used in human commerce and industry, yet part of their appeal is that they represent pure elemental Nature. This work explores the interstice between the beauty found in Nature and the beauty of industrial waste.

Toronto, 5/95