Website Updated!

Well, my website is all neatened up and updated. That's good!

Holy eyestrain! Never mix Philip Glass and html.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

(very early) December Update

Lots of good things going on.

- Plans are shaping up for a show of my new work at KWT Contemporary in the late summer or early fall of 2012, as well as a show for Galerie La Petite Mort in November 2012.

- I've been invited to submit a piece for a travelling group show called YESSR4, that will travel from Buenos Aires, Argentina, from March 15th to April 8th. Then, from Santiago, Chile, from May 10th to June 3rd. Then finally on to Ottawa to La Petite Mort from July 6th to July 29th. It looks pretty interesting. Definitely not flowers and teapots kinds of stuff.

-I'm submitting work to be included in a new book to be published by Bruno Gmunder. It will feature thirty-eight artists, all of whom work with the male figure.

2B Magazine Article

Oooh! An article in Montreal's 2B magazine, about the show!

(Plus, a wee interview). Huzzah!

Link here

Screencapture:

Thanks Ottawa!

It was a wonderful show opening weekend. Lot of laffs, drinks, conversation and a really good dinner party. Thanks to Guy Berube and his gallery staff for making it all go so well.

Lookin' Good!

Image courtesy of the La Petite Mort gallery website.

Galerie La Petite Mort has just put up pictures of my new show all hung up, as well as some nifty painting details from them.

It's always such a surprise to have seen the paintings hanging around the studio for a year, all homey and ordinarily familiar...then - bam! They're up and looking all official!

Link:

http://www.lapetitemortgallery.com/november-2011/

Website Updated

I've begun updating my website (www.jameshuctwith.ca) to provide readers with a less irritating experience. It's more comprehensible now.
The new show is all there, with , I think, a more telling set of pics than can be shown here.

Images From The New Show

The Land Of Milk And Honey

12x12"

Oil On Panel

2011

Stormwatcher

12x12"

Oil On Panel

2011



























Self Portrait

12x12"

Oil On Panel

2011

Roadside

22x28"

Oil On Canvas

2011

The Helpful Snake

36x36"

Oil On Canvas

2011

Chrysalis

30x40"

Oil On Canvas

2011

Memory Night

22x28"

Oil On Canvas

2011

Man With A Glove (Medical Student)

24x30"

Oil On Canvas

2011

Helene

12x12"

Oil On Panel

2011

Fay Beset By Errant Cupids

12x12"

Oil On Canvas

2011

Christ Pissing On A Pile Of Money

30x40"

Oil On Canvas

2011

OWS

Just a few posts and weeks ago, I was darkly complaining about the awful feelings of helplessness that had seemed to have saturated everything - how being bullied, browbeaten, lied to and fearful had increasingly become the norm.

Then, Occupy Wall Street, and the Occupy movement started, and - well, what a difference a few weeks have made.

Who knows where it's all going? But It's great to see a movement so inclusive, and so concerned with social justice. I hope it goes far - and reaches those right at the top. Further even - I hope that this is the start of something that will let great and uplifting change come through. Innovative, creative change. More goals than demands, more solutions than problems.

October Update

New Show

Memory Night

Friday, November 4, 2011

7-10pm

Galerie La Petite Mort Gallery

306 Cumberland Street

Ottawa, Ontario

Canada, K1N 7H9

613 - 860 - 1555

The show will run until November 27, 2011

Another September Update

The first painting finished for the November show and photographed. It's a mood and a puzzle shaped like a portrait. The likely titles decided upon. The artist's statement sent.

All in all, a good day.

Moods and Storms

I'm back to work today, after about five days of refusals. My views haven't changed any, but you can only keep up the furies so long. News is breaking since yesterday about the heedless, unnecessary and horrible cuts our newly-elected Mayor is about to inflict on this city. At this point, aside from signing petitions and passing on the usual social bits of interest, it's a relief to feel some distance and resignation. There's only so much you can control - if that's even the right word to use. Maybe 'influence' would be a better word. One has to pick one's battles, as well.

As it stands got my two co-existing downers and a long mental hangover from trouble to murk with daily.

North America isn't used to history. North America has thought, since the First People genocides, that it can control history. But history is really starting to take North America and wring it.

But, as for art and furious times: Matisse painted right through two world wars, but you'd never know it. His work is consistently abiding with pleasure. No one picks on him for that - it's hard to imagine him being of the necessary aesthetic temperament to paint the trenches. Sargent tried it, but the results didn't quite impact. He was too late and long in his fatuous career of painting gilded cream puffs by then.

It's interesting - is the art that dealt with trouble quite as...loved now? You don't hear the names of noted war artists very often. Barclay McClelland springs to mind - but not too many others. Pictorial art dealing directly with war hasn't held up in the mainstream.

Abstraction took worldwide anxieties up, perhaps with better results. Picasso's Guernica is a masterpiece, though he preferred to deal with his friends, dames and mythologies. Notably, there's Motherwell's Elegies For The Spanish Republic. However modern art is loved, it's generally ambivalent about being tied subject matter, or even a name. Divorced from appearance, it could deal with anything without having to actually bow to it. As warfare jumped ahead in inhuman, mechanized scale, maybe that range of distancing it embodied, combined with it's large physical scale, allowed it to succeed where humane pictorialism began to fail.

I'd say representations of war have held up in the media, but they haven't really. Reporter's images of it have been frontally blocked by the government, for starters, and the reporting has been 'imbedded' anyway, as they say. The programs about it are pretty crap. There's been a lot more worthy social art close to home, but it's more localized.

I don't paint abstractly, and I don't think I'm the guy to take on the woes of the world pictorially, either. My stuff is more inward, more hesitant. That said, I wonder who could do it?

Who's painting about the CIA, rendition, torture, right-wing authoritarianism, pollution, machined media, petro-Christianity and all the other things bedevilling us right now?

Cezanne said that he wanted "to conquer Paris with an orange." He did. Isn't that interesting?

That bit of history soothes my soul, right now.

DPN

To leaven the mood, it's great to see that Diseased Pariah News has all it's back issues online! See it all here.

But I'm Shopping As Fast As I Can!

Some fucking anniversary.

Things have gotten worse in just ten years.

_______________________

This puts me in a mood.

Right now I'm hating painting, thinking art is a complete fucking waste of time. A know-nothing pursuit patronized by grasping shits, and maintained by wifty, useless wankers.

This mood seems to be lasting. I don't think it applies to just art these days, either.

Our whole society is currently overextended on rotten moral credit, and no one knows why anyone is doing anything past a certain point, except for the insistent drumbeat to pile up money at any cost. The pigs are running the show, and there's no intelligent resistance. War, fear, stupidity and lies are becoming common currency along with wholesale slavery, superstition and torture. There is no serious movement happening to prosecute the assholes responsible.

I don't suppose it's bad if artists lose faith every now and then. In fact, I'd say, why should we have it in the first place?

Art doesn't seem to be addressing what's going on in a way has any influence, and I don't expect television or movies to address the hideous fucking human rot at the top of our society, either. Commerce here - corporate and it's offshoots - has it's roots deep in slaughter. The fruits of that tree are surveillance, curtailment and fear.

All our claims to morality, peace, culture, and human progress are bankrupt now. And isn't that fucking depressing.

Studio Bits, early September 2011

September Update

First Week:

Things are crawling along. Huzzah. Yeah, the painting's going OK.

Sometimes one just doesn't feel like writing pleasant, family-friendly updates.

I'm overcome with a kind of miserable fury today, at seeing a painter whose work I loathe go for sale for over thirty thousand dollars a pop. This is why I have to be careful how I cruise the net - for the sake of my sanity. Porn, paranoia and atrocity are old hat, but work this dire can still dim the available light in the world a bit.

The work is so smugly horrid, so screechingly, plonkingly execrable and derivative, so pornographically soulless and so remarkably popular, I can't help that wish that everyone who paid to purchase one of them comes down with a case of galloping facial piles and and cramping trots. It would do the world a further favour if the only way to remediate these symptoms was to break the painting over the artist's head and set it aflame.

I can't blame my bad mood on parasitical gay art alone.

Here in Toronto, our mayor (and his near-indistinguishable brother) seem set on destroying just about everything that makes this city liveable. Frills like transit, education, health, tolerance, gay rights, the creative class, understanding, intellectualism, peace, trust in and cooperation with government, etc. You get the picture.

Living in Toronto is a little bit like being in a relationship you can't break off, but don't know why.

It's not beautiful. It's not soulful. If it were a person, it would be a capable but joyless dancer. It asks people how much money they make over dinner, isn't sure why 'puritan' is a term of opprobrium, and, in a local joke, says, "Thank God It's Monday"...and yet it tries so hard to do right. I hate the place in such interesting ways, that I've kind of ended up loving it. Sort of.

So, when you have two suburban...how to put this kindly - OK, I will be polite - barging in and claiming that the city is a mess, a socialist hellhole full of commies and art, a bubbling fountain of ill-gotten gravy over a mountain of gold coins stolen by evil socialists from the honest hands of labourers everywhere, etc., etc...it doesn't help the mood.

I was barely in love with this striving, antiseptic, orderly, gung-ho good sport of a place as it stands. Now they're making it even more difficult.

The only good thing about them (The Mayor and his City Councillor brother) is that they've got the populace so riled up they're actually turning out speak, organize and to passionately defend the city. People's hearts are swelling, and their stopped tongues have been loosed. Pride, rambunctiousness and, yes! - even passion - are in evidence all about. This is wonderful! It will be an even more wonderful day when you can walk down the streets of Toronto and feeeeeeelllll that luxe passion in the air all the time, instead of having to find it in the bottom of the freezer, and thaw it out.

What's happening in Toronto seems to be part of a North American trend: ruling via enforced stupidity. It's very scary. It's most evident in the United States right now, with the Republican leadership trials featuring two people who are, to put it kindly, imbecilic, superstitious, manipulative fanatics.

Personally, I always feared being ruled by "intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic", to quote H.G. Wells. But this mucky, pointless sewer of rotten effluvia that's drowning out rational discourse - and even set on actually eliminating rational thought - is far worse.

Canada got a little whiff of it today, as our charmless Prime Minster tried to stir up fears that Moorification was a great threat to Canada. Real classie, thar, bringing that up on the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Center attack. An announcement by him about the perils of unjust wars, abridgement of human rights, and fundamentalist religion would have been nice. That, and how he can manage to even stand up with his lips firmly rallied 'round the flag of a wayard superpower so fundamentally corrupt that news of it's insincere dealings worldwide reads like rivulets of bloody pus. But, he's a fundamentalist himself, so I won't be expecting any water from that rock.

Well, I'm off to bed at 7a.m. Goddamn.

August Update

Well, the deadline for the fall show is getting near. I'm glad to say that I'm not going out of my mind - well, maybe I got there through doing this for so many years now ! - but I'm not feeling too bad.

I'm glad that all the simmering and obstructing and worrying and trying has started to pay off in some really interesting resolutions for the new work. I can't believe how much I've attempted and discarded. I think I've thrown out more 'starts' and starting material than almost any other show. One inconclusive start after another.

Still, nothing need be in vain. It's been an interesting process, as I've had about three or four changes in what I thought the organizational theme of the show would be. Each time, after a period of initial work on various pieces that related to it, some other pieces would start to change more interestingly, and lead off in a new direction that ended up being different from the initial group.

So - what's been interesting is trying to give up aiming at an overall theme, and instead concentrate on lettting the show author itself at this point. This mostly involves letting myself enjoy what I'm doing and letting it speak back to me about what it needs to make itself more beautiful. That's pretty enjoyable. It's also that magical time when it is possible to do so due to all the base material I've been working up.

So - things are going well. That's wonderful.

I also took a commission a while back, which is a rare thing for me. I have an instinctual reaction to any interference with what I choose to do - namely, to break necks. Taking direction on subject matter is usually an absolute no-no with me.

This commission was so...unique in it's subject matter that I thought I could take it. Because, to put it mildly, it wasn't exactly nicety-nice family material.

Getting down to doing it was like trying to pull my own teeth. Still, it all came out in the wash. Or came out swimmingly. At any rate, my heels are sore from digging them in so deep, but I'm pleased with the result. The painting, of course, which came out well, but also a new pleasure in the freedom that has come out of fighting for the space in which I can be at ease.

July Update

Dear Readers:

Ugh! Not a lot to report. I've been working on a private commission, which is not something I usually do. I thought I'd give it a try, seeing as there's nothing like breaking one's own rules every now and then to keep things flexible.

Anyway, it's been a better month for thinking about painting than painting about painting. What has been done is simplistic. What I haven't done is enormous. At this point, I feel like a willful alien to conception and execution.

Another update shortly.

America's Next Top Capstone

Everyone seems to hate that "awful unblinking eye" (to quote Gore Vidal) atop the pyramid of lore on the American Dollar Bill. Yet, I never hear of alternate visual proposals. Something with charm and novelty might be of interest - maybe a design that would have to be changed yearly.

How would you make it over?

Fantasy List For Canada

Over at the Urban Toronto Forum, there was a post that went up, asking for megaproject ideas for Canada - "Wackiness Encouraged". Here was my favourite:

1-Coast-to-coast maglev high-speed rail.
Right from St. John's to Vancouver (7,821 km, or, 4,860 miles) at, say, (483 kmh or 300 mph.) Coast to coast in just over 16 hours.

Toronto to Niagara Falls (130 km or 81 miles) - 1/2 hour.

Toronto to Ottawa - (353 km or 220 miles) - 3/4 hour

Toronto to Montreal - (504 km or 313 miles) - 1-1/4 hour

Toronto to Vancouver - (3354 km or 2084 miles) 7 hours.

Union would be Toronto's main stop, brought in through a deep tunnel that would contain more than enough room for extra layers of rail traffic and transit of all types. The new TGV station would replace the Toronto Convention Centre's north building, with the replacement convention centre space placed underneath it. The Bremner street entrance could become the defacto entrance for the entire convention centre.
The line would continue back out of the city, in a tunnel with a stop at Pearson. Another tunneled high speed line would leave Union, surfacing near Pearson, and curving through the countryside to the U.S. Border at Niagara Falls / Buffalo. The line coming into Union could be combined with:


2-The burial of the Gardiner expressway, and removal of all rail lines and highways from Toronto's ravines. (Scenic wandering lanes and the odd trolley allowed).

Mammoth, deeply-laid tunnels under the suburbs instead - with multiple levels and compartments, containing both heavy and passenger rail, subway, automotive and utility uses. At the same time, this would be accompanied by the general picturesque and soothing narrowing of downtown streets with accompanying widening of sidewalks and full tree cover. It sounds kind of tame, as far as megaprojects go, but it would be...pretty complicated.

3-The complete conversion of the country's electrical needs to solar production

...making us independent of any need for nuclear, gas, oil, coal or hydroelectric sources.

4 -A working fusion reactor. Just in case that solar bit takes awhile.

If neither of the above work, a giant battery that can absorb and store the power of lightning strikes would be nice.

5 - A "'Manhatta" project that would link up major scientists from all over the world to find the natural and renewable counterparts to all the components of distilled oil now used in every application - from fertilizer, to transport, to medicine, to electronics. Canada's agricultural interests could be shifted to suit, making us shortly oil independent - and help us also be well off by exporting the encycopedic knowlege gained.

6 -A spaceport for Toronto. A Canadian moonbase and hotel, too, eh?

7 - Enormous year-round indoor summer parks for Canadian cities. Each of these parks would be, say, three to five miles across, and tremendously high inside. High and huge enough, in fact, that the structure would practically disappear. Buckminster Fuller's domes still might be the best way to do this. With artificial full sunlight and deep heating mimicking the summer in the depths of winter, these parks would help relieve seasonal affective disorder. Their size would guarantee return visits, as it would take years to "see it all".
If this size is prohibitive for most cities, they could have smaller ones. That, or we could entreat Cuba to join Canada. Or build a giant touristy one of near-ungraspable dimensions in high-north Nunavut. See: fusion reactor.

8 - A varied and thriving canadian electric car industry. For trucks, transit and other conveyances, too. Oh, and make 'em glamorous.

9 - Not so much a mega-structure as a mega-law: Invisible, ongoing boundary walling of cities, towns and hamlets in Canada. Draw a line or circle around each settlement, however big or small. Once it fills up, it only goes up from there. Not out. Quickly, there would be no sprawl. None.
In the city and need to get out? Cross the street!
10 - A Huge (truly) Central Park For Toronto - The bulldozing and resettlement of entire inner suburbs ( redone in stunningly advanced and gorgeous edge housing) to develop an immense central park for the city of Toronto. Density transfers from the amount of land recovered would encourage an urban edge to the park with a strong emphasis on streetlife - theatres, clubs, and variegated delights that address the park.

11 -Re-widen the St. Lawrence Seaway. This will encourage lake transit, and allow ocean-bound cruise ships to dock at Chicago and Toronto. On the quite fanciful side, A cross-country canal, along the U.S border. From the Great Lakes to where the Fraser meets the Pacific. Make it big enough for shipping, leisure craft, and the occasional flotilla of houseboats. Ship the dirt back to Toronto and create some worthy hills around it from the northeast to the northwest.

Side projects:

-A huge Canadian scientific effort to cure all deadly viruses, bacteria and cancers. Starting with AIDS.

-Find a disease-resistant elm, and bring that beautiful tree back.

-Free University for anybody who makes the grade.

-An urban cathedral that will take a two hundred to thousand years to build by hand.

-A 2000 foot high cubist-honeycombed semi-hollow artists co-operative. A baffling and beautiful superstructure strung together with bridges, beams and atriums, it would be a vertical community free to any working artist with an established portfolio and yearly output. Non-established artists could secure living space via an intake program. All ceilings would be a minimum of twenty feet high, and the bare concrete studio rooms - at least thirty feet square each, would all have sufficient ventilation, soundproofing, and light. Special zones would be set aside inside the structure for speciality trades like heavy industry experimentation, noise works, the chemical and biological arts and transport play.

-The hiring and dedicated application of thousands of artists from all over the world to beautify Toronto - working in tandem with scientists, shamans, energy healers, housewives and ecologists and nerds.

At least four times the subway lines we have in Toronto. With express lanes, ring routes, etc., etc. Blah, blah & so on.

-A greenbelt and canal around Toronto's city core to act as both an animal expressway and habitat - plus a picturesque place for scenic boatrides.

- Hierachalist/ oppressive conservative governments out of power, egalitarian / liberating ones in. Steady banks and dancing streets. One citizen, one vote. Peace, Joy and exploration.

June Update

Here are some pics of paintings under construction in the studio. A lot of tight dark work is gettting flooded with washes of fairly bright white. Odd.

It's four months to the show, so, this is the time when all the concentration starts narrowing in. The year of forward thinking, background thinking and planning and dithering that proceeeds it really starts to come forth and show itself.

May Update

Still working away on the 14 paintings for the November show at La Petite Mort gallery of Ottawa, in November.

Eight small ones, two medium sized, one three-foot square one, four moderate-larges and three large ones (around 5 foot long or longer) are being worked on. So - although not every single one will make it to the show, a decent amount will.

Themes? Er, well right now it's sort of a not-yet-reconciled battle between depicting a kind of synthetic world of industrially composed psychologies, psysiologies and situations...and romantic painterly enjoyments.

April Update

Work on the fall show for La Petite Mort is continuing, with sixteen paintings on the go in the studio. I expect twelve to fourteen of them to make it to the final cut. They are figurative, moody and deal with a theme I've detected I've been working on since 2003: psychology, and the modern world as laboratory.

Due to my 'year of tiredness' after a much needed medical treatment (thank you, excellent Canadian Healthcare!), I'm back up and running. It's been a good opportunity to get back from the work for a while and richly re-examine it.

Because my production has been so low this last year, KWT Contemporary has scarce received any new works from me. They do have two pieces of mine, currently. I was a bit concerned about this scarcity, so I had a good talk with the Manager there, and, wonderfully, she was great about it.
Although my focus is on the fall show for La Petite Mort right now, I will be beginning to produce work also for KWT this fall - and I am talking with them about the distinct possibility of a fall show in Toronto for 2012. That is very exciting.

I'm Generally Over At Facebook Now.

Hello everyone.

I'm mostly running with the facebook collective these days - joining the mass exodus, like everyone else. Detailed and regular postings here are rather scarce, as you've probably noticed.

I'm still continuing the blog, though. There'll be monthly updates and I'll continue to post any extra stuff pertainting to shows and upcoming events and whatnot.

Thanks!
James

XeXe > KWT

XeXe Gallery in Toronto is now KWT Contemporary.

Their website is here.

Cloudbusting

One Can Dream...

I think Toronto would benefit from having:

a) A Planetarium

b) A lakeside honkey-tonk amusement park

c) A rival opera house

d) An official city circus and festival of oddities

e) A vast enclosed year-round public park, with a botanical garden

f) A giant wave pool

h) A permanent burlesque revue

i) A Winter Love Carnival

l) A mind-blowing year-round indoor skateboard park

j) A branch of the Tate, Guggenheim, Louvre or Prado (one or more)

k) A mythic history (one or more)

l) Intricate, intimate and winding streets, laden with fruiting trees, redolent of mystery

m) Harbour & Lake Waterborne Transit

n) A wild urban 'transit roller coaster' linking tourist sights

o) A monumental social generator for the arts, either in the form of an interior-spaced live-work skyscraper co-operative, or a massively refurbished Hearn Generating station

p) Over fifty percent of public video screen time dedicated to non-commercial citizen's videos and video art

q) Picturesque ruins

La Vie De Boheme

Now I just need an idea. Just one idea. Just one...!

Office people get to hang out in one thousand foot high buildings that cover entire city blocks, full of little else but other office people.
Soldiers often meet to step stoically with other soldiers, soaking in the fulsome atmosphere of vast bases.
Factory people are famous for consistently consorting with scores of other factory people with charming regularity, under ample roofs.

I wonder how much business would get done if after some initial training, we put set businessmen in rooms alone, and asked them to "make it all up" - mathematics, business models, accounting sheets, the whole thing - and tell them that they'll get paid - someday, perhaps. Reminded them constantly that numbers were once regarded as witchcraft, and what they are doing now is a charming throwback with no real expected contribution to society. Softened, of course, with the reassurance that their business scribblings might have increased theoretical value after they're dead - to some connoisseur, somewhere. For their aesthetic value.

Artists in Toronto are a bit isolated from one another. Heck - a lot of people here feel isolated from each other! That's not just the climate or the deep protestant substrate of the place - it's in the structure of the city itself. It's endless right-angled grid of streets shooting off to the four points of the compass without interruption have created a city without a natural sense of interiority. No place to linger, ponder or intimately dawdle at ease.

I'd like to see a new one-thousand foot skyscraper in downtown Toronto dedicated to affordable artists live-work space. Wouldn't that be grand?
One would need a portfolio to get in, and a touch of supplementary credentials: art school, maybe, or exhibitions or references and the like. The building itself would be basically concrete and steel - bare essentials - fantastically rough and spare, but capable of hosting needs as diverse as filmmaking, welding, oil painting, printmaking, sculpture and very loud music without complaint. Ceilings would be set at a fifteen foot minimum, with generous windows. Each floor would have a small glassy "living room" open to all for those times you want to get out of your room, but don't want to go outside (especially in the cold Canadian winter). An array of galleries, clubs and services would fill the base, and double-height skylobbies every twenty stories would contain specialty rooms, casual meeting places and creative labs. The building itself would have much needed interiority in these rooms - places for people to co-mingle in non-programmatic, non-commercial ways. These 'social generator' spaces would give the building it's heart - and save it from merely being a variant on your typical high-rise filing cabinet.

I figure if the government can build the Skydome (nee: Rogers Centre) stadium for $895 million, then sell it for the price of a Muskoka Cottage...and if they can sell highway 407 (estimated worth at ten billion dollars) for wonderbread, then how about an affable investment like this, for a mere pittance?

I Swear, The Flower Shop Was Right Here!

Quote - !

"Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends."
Lewis Mumford

Black From A Buddhist Perspective...

Buddhist:
"Black is the color of hate, transmuted by the alchemy of wisdom into compassion. Darkness represents the imminence of the absolute, the threshold of the experience. It is used for terrific ritual actions, the radical conquest of evil in all its forms - conquest not by annihilating, but by turning even evil into good. Thus, in the black paintings (Tibetan nagtang) the black ground casts forth deities in luminous visions of translucent colors." - Nitin Kumar

Happy New Year!

Note

To work with oil paint isn't to work with theory or praxis, it's more akin dealing with the body: it's shit stains, grease stains, smells, mumbles, murmurs, uncertain assertions and frailties.

To work well with oil paint is to respectfully acknowledge disease, ambiguity, transmission, mortality.