Paintings About Art

Around 1990, I began making paintings depicting aspects of the art world. This series titled Paintings about Art, looks at art in the same way as a still life. The paintings depict art in various locations from artists’ studios, to storage facilities, to art galleries, to personal collections, to museum exhibitions, etc. I am interested in looking at art and how it is defined by context. Dan Flavin’s fluorescent fixtures are invested with completely different meanings because of context, whether it is a hardware store or a museum. The art in its context can be either homogenous or jarring. It is this point of transformation that interests me. The paintings offer a multifaceted view of a world within the world. One painting, Crate with Dan Graham Sculpture (C.C.A.), shows a Dan Graham work during installation at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. The painting depicts the piece halfway between transportation and exhibition.

As I work from my own photographs, the current series hinges on the intersection between painting and photography. The relation of photography to painting has always been a source of fascination. The photograph is also an indispensable tool for the paintings. The paintings reveal a deadpan image with a minimum of subjective editorializing. The paintings are small, approximately 20 x 30 to 50 x 70 cm. The size offers an inversion and contestation of the overstatement in so much contemporary art. They are painted on Baltic plywood panels with flashe paint, a form of vinyl gouache that has very brilliant matte colours. This physical aspect of the work is very important.

Cave Tour

2014

Flashe on panel

48.4 x 63.4 cm