June 2012

I'm officially an independent now.

I've closed up shop with Gallery La Petite Mort in Ottawa. I've had a good time with Guy Berube who runs it - nearly four years - but I've felt it's time for a change. Thanks to Guy and the crew at LPM for all their work on my behalf.
For the forseeable future, work will be available for sale from myself, directly.  Works from the past will be available, and some new ones, as well. For a list of them, you can check my website; www.jameshuctwith.ca

The need to change the way I work has been gathering steam for a few years now.
Ever since I started painting for shows back in 1995, I've always felt a bit behind the eight ball. I've been generally working towards shows ever since, but without a cushion of work to fall back on, I've always felt a bit behind. In the last few years it's been becoming clear to me that I needed to reverse the order: get work together first - work done personally at my own discretion - and then look for venues.

So - it's a strange thing to be without full-time galleries for the first time in seventeen years, but it's an exciting time as well. Time to regroup, rethink, savour and prepare for some new adventures.

May 2012 Update

Well, it's been awhile, hasn't it? It hasn't been quiet here at the studio, though. There have been lots of good developments.

I've let my time with KWT contemporary, in Toronto, go bye-the-bye. They're going through some changes, and I decided that this would be a good time to not overextend myself. So, although they had some work of mine, it's been returned to me. It was wonderful dealing with them though - we had a great time! So, thanks, KWT and all the best!

I'm working away on new personal work. Inner-Bible stories, mythological-mystic figures and jumbly stuff. I'll keep you posted. Say a prayer!

Aside from that, I'm doing some portrait commissions, which are really tough, odd and rewarding. I used to swear I'd never do them, because I was afraid I would never get them right. Now I think they turn out to be lovely - but it is a long haul to do them, because they demand so much consideration. The current one I'm working on has taken three or four times longer than I thought it would. Now, it's turned out really well in my opinion...but it can be a bit nerve-racking at times, living with something uncertain that others are depending on you for. Something quite intimate and lasting. So there are good days and bad weeks...but it certainly is rewarding to see something unexpectedly good come through.

 Hand detail from portrait in progress.

 Things keep getting quieter and quieter, by design. More and more I want to sit with the art and work on it, myself - free from deadlines and business. There's a lot I want to learn and enjoy - and that's stuff you can only do by doing the work attentively. It's no consolation to know you can paint a painting, and miss out on it, even as you work on it. That's working on automatic, or working under pressure. I think it's time for a re-immersion, a re-visioning and some new, lovely approaches.

Studio Life February 2012

Update - February 2012

Cryptic notations from the aether.

Well, I'm still working away at some portrait commissions. The one I'm trying to finish first is being particularly resistant to letting me know what to do with it. I started it, then stalled, was sure I could finish it, then wasn't sure if I ever would. Then it sat on and off my easel for a few weeks, while I resented feeling incompetent and slow about it. Then, suddenly, I figured out the background (which always influences the face out front. It's an old artist's saying - if you're having trouble with the figure, look at the background). Then, the background stalled on me again. What's up? Maybe it's the winter blues. Anyway, I've got to finish it up and do it well, which is a bit like demanding a rope be pushable. Happily, the next few steps with it should be fairly straightforward.

I'm doing a lot of sketching. I have, possibly, the worst 'shorthand' in the world for sketching, which means that the meanings I have jotted down in near-abstract line form are near-unreadable to me after the fact. I should get back to life drawing more often and shore this up, I suppose. My sketchbook is filling up with squiggly hieroglyphics, though, which might mean something, somehow. Ergh, the vagueness.

The other portrait comission is just starting out at the compositional and drawing stage. Both the commissions are 16" square, which is an borderline-peculiar size to do a portrait on. First, it's hard to not make the head so large that it doesn't suit one's painting style. It's easy to make it just a bit too big for my brushwork to work properly. Then, if the head tends to be smaller along with the figure, it suddenly creates a whole lot of room around figure that needs to be filled in well. That is challenging too. How dim, how bright? Subject matter or more abstract? Personal to the sitter or otherwise? If so, how and why?

Otherwise, the studio is positively recriminatory with prepared yet unworked on canvasses. Or partially worked on. More on that later.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, everybody!

January update:

Not a heck of a lot to report. I'm working on a few portraits and portrait commissions, as well as getting going on a painting for the travelling YESSRS exhibition.

Aside from that, the studio is basically full of canvasses and mounted panels being prepared for painting upon. That means lots of gesso - the protective ground used on the surface to be painted - being deployed. So the studio has all these pure white rectangles starting to proliferate in it. I love the look of them. They're so pure, I hardly want to touch them.

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.