One of the best things about social media is the opportunity to share your creative journey with so many other people on a similar pilgrimage. The only problem is finding the self within that crowd. The economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill’s essay, Civilization, written in 1836, expresses this with uncanny prescience,
“A state of society where any voice, not pitched in an exaggerated key, is lost in the hubbub. Success, in so crowded a field, depends not upon what a person is, but upon what he/she seems: mere marketable qualities become the object instead of the substantial ones, and a person’s capital and labour are expended less in doing anything than in persuading other people that he/she has done it.”
If the camera had existed in 1836, he might have foresaw the selfie. Mill’s Civilization is heartening because we haven’t evolved a new system of ‘hubbub’, just a more comprehensive and addictive one, but we have 188 intervening years of people surviving and thriving despite our best efforts to lose our way. I certainly count myself lucky that my work was developed free from the constant glare of the attention economy of social media. We are incentivized to connect and inevitably we follow the visual murmuration, dragged by its undertow. Being influenced or influencing has always been with us, as Mill’s essay demonstrates, but the global reach and the ready refreshed screen of social media adds a desensitizing levelling of the new and the novel. If our gaze is always turned outwards, the new is just ripples on the surface of the constant stream we consume.
I was definitely influenced by European, Mexican, and Japanese culture along with Neo-Expressionists like the French artist Jean Charles Blais. He painted onto the surface of old billboard paper; I saw his work in a gallery—-huge scale images on thick layers of glued paper hanging off the walls. When I returned from Japan I worked on a sketchbook of on-site drawings, and then developed large format oil pastel drawings. This is an interlude in my work that I had always seen as a seminal step in my development, I only worked on these for 2 years before abandoning pastel drawing. Returning to these images now, I see them as a balancing act. The act of developing a body of work in the sharp glare of the culture we make work within, and how not to be blinded.
Balance is finding your centre and moving forward. These pastels, combining 80’s Neo-Expressionism, Mexican colour and the texture and spaces of Japan had no crowd watching, no audience or client to satisfy. This is critical, they were in dialogue with my work, my experience, and my path forward, but completely mute to an outside audience. Every development in my work since has happened this way, with the studio walls and the body of work offering their testimony. Once the body of work exists, there is a voice to speak and to share.
The pastels were everything my education was not. In school I was a line carver and I loved to use line and cross hatch to build form and create character in faces, and I was devoted to the figure and life drawing. The pastel images had no people and the linear had to give way to the textural and tactile. I was using very soft Sennelier pastels with fluorescent and iridescent colours that were nearly impossible to photograph.
In Kyoto, my drawings spanned the pages of the sketchbook as I responded to the panoramic view. My on-site Toronto sketchbook mimicked this, but the drawings were just preludes for the pastels. The medium became the driving force of the expression. The pastels expanded out from the sketchbook pages. I was unable to finesse the drawing or force the forms to behave like my ink drawings. The awkward raw quality of the subject became more pronounced in the pastels. The logic and intrinsic nature of the material became an incredible teacher for me. What the pastels couldn’t do became their strength.
The pastel drawings ended when I moved to a factory studio space in 1990 and started teaching a once a week life drawing class. The pastels had performed a critical service. They had forced me to address materials, scale, surface, space, and most importantly offered me a way to question and answer my work.
I learned to follow the process, to look for the collisions between materials, surfaces, and application. When I first applied oil paint and solvents to paper, and gravity and chemicals took over I was tuned to look for the possibilities in the material not the manipulation of tools, or the mimicry of a source. I purposely used terrible brushes so that I wasn’t tempted to finesse forms. I lived with mistakes, immediacy, and solvents misbehaving.
The raw multi-coloured pastel buildings were a necessary step to find an approach that centred materials as content and a studio of work as audience. It began with a sketchbook in Japan, a chance encounter with the work of Jean Charles Blais in Switzerland, the gorgeous Sennelier oil pastels and led to an incredible vein of exploration for the next 20 years. The work you should be doing is sitting right infront of you, it’s within your grasp and within the materials you use. The search is for your question and it’s intrinsic not extrinsic, it’s not found in looking outward, despite all the content the world offers us, close your studio door and make another piece. I can’t wait to see the work when you are done.