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.

Allan Gardens Park, downtown Toronto, from the studio.

Midwinter

Last February I was working on the first three Angel No paintings. Three went to XeXe Gallery, and a triptych went off to La Petite Mort gallery. Then, I more or less stopped work for awhile afterwards for some scheduled medical maintenance. The six months break I initially planned grew as I felt the need to recharge. It's been about nine months or so, now. Nine months without producing new work, or feeling any novel creative oomph.

I tend to berate myself when I'm not nagging myself to think up new things, or forcing myself to "produce". But I've had to remind myself that I've been painting as a full-time occupation now since 1995, and, until a few years ago, been working on the side at one job or another at the same time. Needing a break is a very natural thing.

I'm feeling very, very shy about getting back to work. That's a wonderful feeling, because it's so gentle. To not get back to work, exactly, but to come more into loving it.

It's hard to love something inconsistent, though - or something that we're inconsistent in relation to. I wonder and worry a lot about producing or not producing, the role and capability of art anywhere now - especially painting, and of my own capabilities.

At one time I could love art more easily, because it seemed so much more grand, steadfast and certain than I was. Maybe, out there, somehow, it still is. The last five years have shown me, though, that art is as fragile as I am. As fragile as we are. It's not something imperial, unchanging, unendingly beautiful and amazing. If we're weary, it can weary. If we're sick and tired, it might just annoy and reproach us. The mystery shrinks to indecipherability, the composed to the contrived. The culture to the commodity. It can fail.

I wish I knew where the keys were to reliably seeing it through. I wish the cultural situation was a bit different, that the atmosphere was more rich in artistic vitamins. There's lots of remarkable and beautiful social creativity going on, but not a lot involving mere linseed oil and canvas. Early twenty-first century Toronto is a long way from wherever painting was deeply venerated, whenever that was.

To be an artist here is to be soft, irrational, suspect, perhaps useless.

In the book and then, you act (making art in an unpredictable world), the author Anne Bogart writes:
"The South African writer Antje Krog described meeting a nomadic desert poet in Senegal who described the role of poets in his culture. The job of the poet, he explained to her, is to remember where the water holes are. The survival of the whole group depends on a few water holes scattered around the desert. When his people forget where the water is, the poet can lead them to it".

This is a lovely, self-satisfying metaphor. But now, the group is so populous, so inventive, it has wandered so far from the original water holes...who can say they haven't found streams, lakes, rivers, or even a beer parlour or two? Sailing and firewater, soda pop, candy bars and sushi. Electricity, antidepressants, gaming and factory beef?

There's no way that I can see that oil painting will ever speak again with the cultural voice and authority it posessed one hundred years ago. C'est la vie, I suppose. Certainly I wouldn't want to live back in a world without bleach, antibiotics, electricity and proper sewers. Not to mention a Monarchic state control on official art production. Times have changed. It puts oil painting in a strange and tacky position, though: something along the lines of an ingratiating novelty, a boutique luxury item or persistent superstition.

Although art shouldn't be merely tied to utility - what artist doesn't want their work to be meaningful to society? A sense of shared worth is the social currency that presages commerce - and esteem.

I think the thing is now, the tribe has moved on. You can move on with them, if you can live with yourself, not honouring all the poetry in your head. If it won't drive you crazy. You can turn those old poems into cults or pop songs. Or, you can sit by your very own water hole like at some inverse altar, repeating obliquities to whoever chances by at intervals. Get defensive, get generous? Maybe dig some new ones. Maybe start a new group. I don't know.
But whatever the case, the choices, the roles and the social support aren't what they used to be.

Jelly Wobbler

I've Had It Up To Here With Computers! (For The Moment)

Waiting for a six-thousand punch-card return tweet, 1950's

I just went to see Tron: Legacy.

At first, it felt like a great aesthetic sugar rush. Then, a wash of cyclamate. By the end - unfortunately, a heap of rebaudioside A.

How can a thrill twenty-eight years in the making - with a budget of one approximately hundred and seventy million dollars - be so uneven and unsatisfying? I know it's Disney (conventionally chaste, deeply sanitary), so we're not expecting Lynch, VonTrier or even John Guillerman. But it would have been gratifying to have a movie with some deep glimmers of invention filling out the screen under all those new visuals. It's got that over-processed flavour that all the big-box movies seem to be coming in lately: a texture both frantic and turgid.

I suppose I'm disappointed that with the immense resources at it's disposal, the studio could have tapped the best thinkers, visionaries and prognosticators out there to make a film that would not only be current, but prescient - and great fun. Nope! The main bulk of the film doesn't even address the internet - it takes place in a box hidden under someone's desk. In an age where digital media, connectivity and access are rewriting so many social norms, this is a staggering oversight, and calls into question the imaginative capabilities of the writers. If there was ever a time or opportunity to have a movie that looked at the internet from a wholly unique angle, now would be a good time to have it.
New abstracts, mystery, open poetry. But the flick demands that huge lumps of it be taken with a peculiar literalism. It skims breathtakingly through its own hermetic designs. But they don't connect back to anything here.
It made me feel revved, but it didn't satisfy.

That statement we hear so consistently these days, "The Special Effects Are Great!" - isn't it becoming such a dull refrain? A worrisome commonplace? One that gives people of good conscience pause? I think what's interesting, is that movies have been using this tactic to lure us back since, uh, forever. With the money studios have, they could make It Conguered The World look good. Still, we're such suckers for it.

I find this constant propaganda that we should get used to living with/in/as computers to be a bit depressing. I didn't feel uplifted after this latest round. The visuals are unnaturally sweet. But that doesn't get rid of that disagreeable metallic aftertaste.