Tuesday, September 17, 2013

The Burned House

A friend of mine and I spent some time going through an abandoned burnt house and the ruined buildings adjacent to it. I was looking for pictures that might work as both photographs and as material for painting backgrounds and settings. You never know.






















Monday, September 16, 2013

Supercrawl

At the "Supercrawl" - the street fair and mass-gallery show of art on James Street North in Hamilton, Ontario. Sept 14-15th, 2013.


































Wednesday, September 11, 2013

What Has Influenced You As An Artist? #4

 The first wildly inaccurate depiction.

Niagara Falls. 
One of the strangest places on earth. Home to bizarre histories involving giant industries, daredevils, suicides, war, disasters, weird structures, toxic waste dumps, manicured gardens, holiday suites, and scores and scores of marriages in suites with heart-shaped hot tubs. I grew up just a forty-minute drive away from this bizarre carnival of artificial and natural sublimity. Where to begin?


a) Old Power Plants.




Old power plants are off-the-scale creepy - not unllike abandoned mental institutions or hospitals. It's not just the Frankenstein's Laboratory associations that wigs you out - I think it has something to do with being close to that much raw power, barely contained. There's a sense of electricity's primeval, fluidic malice at that scale - plus all the rusted bones of dead engineering - something like the uncanny juju now being inherited by viral biotechnology labs. A suprahuman channelling of inhuman, primitive force.

Giant tunnels were built under the cities of Niagara Falls on both sides of the river, to divert water from above the Falls to the great resevoirs that feed the Hydroelectric plants downriver. That alone wigs me out - huge black underground rivers, vast roarings in darkness that will never see the light of day. Future sinkholes.




b) Problematic Industries




The true un-touristy history of the Falls area is one of industrialization. The area has been a magnet for them from the earliest - at first for water power, then cheap electricity.
The ominous shells of factories and their machines dot the area for miles. At first this was primarily visual pollution, but it later became toxicological. Love Canal, anyone?


c) Towers


Photo by Brian LeBlanc

When I first started going to Niagara Falls, there were three main towers there: The Oneida (later, the Maple Leaf Village Tower, then The Casino Niagara Tower), The Minolta (formerly the Seagram and the Panasonic), and The Skylon. They were all rivalrous, and in dire competition with each other. The brochures printed heights that were measured from not just the base of the tower, but eventually from the top of the Niagara River (adding an extra one hundred and fifty feet!), and even from the bottom of the river! By the time I lost interest, I think they were measuring from sea level. I was shocked to find this behaviour in the gay community, as well, many years later.
The towers fascinated me, but parents would never take me up them, "Too expensive!", they declared, as a threw a sulking fit. Much later I would find out what the term 'Tourist Trap' meant, but until those wild later years, I had to admire them from a non-ticketed distance. The Seagram tower had a great Belgian Waffle Stand at the base, which did soothe one.
The skyline has filled in now on the Canadian side, with the great late hotel boom going on. Scientists were surprised to find that this three-hundred to five-hundred foot tall, Falls-diminishing wall of greed has actually engendered wind resistance near the Falls themselves, sucking spray towards the Canadian side, in a giant man-made vortice.








With not a pyroclastic flow, but merely the Waltzing Waters at it's base.

d) Is for Death!



Photo from Edsen Breyer's Postcard Museum

Suicides, accidents, war and bad engineering and daredevilry - all have taken their toll at the Falls. Some of the deaths were from badly considered social merriment,too.
The Niagara River used to freeze over in the winter, and although the Falls fell onward and continuously, people used to venture out on the (mostly) horizontal parts to toboggan, play, socialize and cross the river. Unfortunately the ice used to crack, as ice on top of a vast, powerful, swirling deep river shot through with terrible currents is wont to do.
On February 4th, 1912, people were out enjoying the Ice Bridge, when it began to crack. Bob Kostoff reported, "Vendors and tourists alike made a mad dash for shore when they heard the thunderous crunching of the ice and felt the movement." In the aftermath, three people were killed.
In 1938, Ice tore the Honeymoon Bridge from it's foundations:
"The Falls View Bridge, popularly known as the Honeymoon Bridge, was built 500 feet north of the America Falls by the Pencoyd Bridge Company of Philadelphia...Subject to high winds, many cars and pedestrians were blown off the Honeymoon Bridge. A motorcyclist applied his brakes when the bridge was wet; he unfortunately plunged to his death over the side of the bridge.
On January 23, 1938, Lake Erie dumped an enormous amount of ice down the falls. The force of the ice was great enough this time to cause severe structural damage. The bridge was closed because of the inevitable collapse. At 4:20 PM on January 27, 1938, the Falls View Bridge, Honeymoon Bridge, collapsed forming a “W” shape on top of the ice." It soon sank to the bottom. 

Some Honeymoon!




e) Clifton Hill.Wax Museums. The Space Spiral. Head Shops. The Blondin Statue. Overpriced food. Tourists. Sore legs.


f)The Spanish Aero Car.

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!


g) Laura Secord

Well-known C.E.O of Canada's first chain of Candy Stores. In the war of 1812, fearing a hostile takeover by the Yankees, she braved the woods in the dead of night to alert investors to the immediate necessity of inflationary stock buying, thus avoiding the absorption of her company into competitive conglomerates from the south. She cemented her position as a fearsome confection inventress, patenter and magnate by systematically blackmailing, then murdering opposition. This culminated in the famous Table Rock Massacre of 1825 which saw eight rival candy-makers blindfolded, hog-tied and dropped into the raging Niagara River under her direct aegis.By 1827, she ran a small gulag of child-labour fueled stone factories under the guise of orphanges, the profits from which she utilized to strike down the primitive labour movement in Upper Canada. Taking advantage of the Fall's shadier side, and it's easily corruptible police force, she used a small army of local muscle to kidnap children from local tourist traps, enslaving them into a harsh lifetime of gruelling treat-making.When enough children could not be found locally, she was known to set out herself, in the dark of night, in her terrible flying steam-powered company 'Night Car' which allowed her to hover outside children's bedroom windows and seize them with mechanical claws.Rumours of her evil spread, though nothing could be proved. It took a petty shoplifting charge at a local butcher shop to finally bring her to court.Brought to trial and found guilty, she endured imprisononment from 1836-1838 in nearby York. She managed to avoid her full sentence through both publicly pious behaviour and carnally seducing Colonel Brock, after flashing him her tits through a barred window. She returned to her still-productive empire, gradually replacing her child army with uneducated migrants to the new world, keeping several exotic lesbian mistresses at a time, until her death in 1868.

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Up From The Sub Basement

The studio is packed with canvasses now - thirty-six of them. Some from old shows, some never satisfactorily finished, some hardly begun, some abandoned and a few still blank. Everything has been hauled up here and made present for looking over, and for forming opinions about what each canvas might be good for according to it's size, texture and feel. As Henry Moore said, "There's a right size for every idea".























Monday, September 9, 2013

Props and Set


Painting Props. Little stages, full of construction, as an environment for painting ideas.

Sunday, September 8, 2013

What Has Influenced You As An Artist? #3


The Tempest, by Giorgione, c.1505


This painting completely enchanted and riveted me as a child. The strange, silent air of it - the coming storm - the woman and child not seeking shelter, the upright onlooker...it had the saturated, immediate quality of a dream.
Between this painting and the Velasquez portrait (below), the emotional and intuitive course of my art was set.

What Has Influenced You As An Artist? #2




The portrait of Infante Felipe Prospero by Velasquez, c.1660

A black and white reproduction of this painting was in a children's History Of Art book we had when I was young. It mesmerized and terrified me. One of the few backgrounds I've ever seen whose darkness had a consuming mental 'roar' to it.

What Has Influenced You As An Artist? #1


Yes, it's true.

The cover photograph to ABBA's The Visitors

By the time this album came out when I was about thirteen years old I was already a monomaniacal fan. When I saw the cover, I nearly fainted. There were all my small-town dreams of European sophistication wrapped up in one glitzy image. And all those paintings! To be in that world! It seemed impossibly dreamy. Academic symbolist art on the walls, to boot.The photo was shot at the studio of Julius Kronberg, a painter in Stockholm. His studio is located there, in Skansen Park.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

View From The Studio


A new applique on Utopia.

Back To The Future.



This blog used to be called 'Dainty Bastard'.

For lots of reasons, I got a bit tired of that, and perhaps ill-advisedly renamed it, "The Living Tableau".

I have never been happy with that name. So, I'm turning the clock back around forwards again to 'Dainty Bastard'.

Sorry for any inconvenience, whiplash, etc.

James


Wednesday, September 4, 2013

September 2013

Fall arrives. When September first arrives, as if on cue, the skies take on a slate grey hue. Baking pies for practice against the coming cold. Comfort food, always good.




Struggling to finish the remaining commissions...


Morning in the studio. Wake up to work.




Day.




Back into night. And another morning follows - with the work right in front.




In the same rooms until nighttime.



Kitchen to studio - back and forth. More baking...pie making...between sallies.




Eating to sleep. Then morning light...



The coffee cup.



Wires and organization.



Mixing The Palette again. Figuring it out again.



Nagging Stacks.



Turps and metals. Then out for a stroll to destress after a client phonecall to repaint...



In the evening reflections.